Thresholds
by Stanrick
Summary: Most people tend to assume they'll wake up exactly where they fall asleep, and usually they have good reason to do so. For someone, however, even that simple certainty stops being a given one strange night, when quite surprisingly he does in fact not wake up where he fell asleep. And that is only the beginning of what will be one strange week in the life of Harry Potter.
1. Awakening

**Disclaimer:** Like the Saruman-possessed Théoden in _The Two Towers_ I lean forward on my throne and snarl, "Harry Potter is mine!" and then – after having witnessed a bar fight in my throne room wherein the unarmed heir to the throne of Gondor, a pretty elf and a stocky dwarf beat the greater part of my personal guard to a pulp – I get exorcised by Gandalf the Uberwhite, defender of the copyright, in one of Peter Jackson's more ridiculous scenes for, I would dare to presume, anyone who read the books before the movies came out (and maybe some who didn't). By that I mean to say that I do not, in fact, own the rights to Harry Potter. Did anyone not get that from that?

**Introduction:** Greetings, everyone! I have written some stuff and once more I have done so in the middle of summer, which is odd considering I would usually describe the season as something like poison to creativity. I mean, try writing a novel-length story in a foreign language while your brain is practically melting in the heat of the dog days. Who in their right mind would do that?

Yeah, well.

At any rate, the first chapter was actually written late last year and then I reread it a couple of weeks back and liked it enough to decide that it might just deserve to be followed by a finished story, so I indeed set out to write the rest of it (if you want to call 95% '_the rest'_). It was initially planned much in the vein of my previous multi-chapter story, _Amor Veritatis_, in regard to length and structure, but then I ended up pulling a little Martin (George R.R.) and the whole thing just kept growing and growing until it finally reached nearly four times the length of what up until now was my longest finished piece. Now it's all done, counting just about 78,000 words in total; split into nine chapters and an epilogue. Yeah, an epilogue. Not my favorite word where Harry Potter is concerned, but there you have it.

Also, this time around it really, _really_ is more Comedy than Drama. Honestly. Cross my heart! I mean, you obviously have to share my sense of humor at least to some degree for it to work, but it's generally much lighter in mood than _Amor Veritatis_ turned out to be.

All of this, as always, comes from the heart of someone who is just a little obsessed with the idea of this particular, fictitious couple (which is all the stranger considering he's usually not the type to be obsessed with any couples, fictitious or not). If that's not your thing, chances are this story won't be either.

So much for my habitually long-winded introduction. Have I forgotten anything? Does anyone care? No? Alrighty then.

Hope you enjoy.

* * *

**Thresholds**

**• Chapter I •**

**Awakening**

In accordance with a tradition upheld by generations upon generations of students attending the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the busiest and most hectic times of every week were to this day the late Sunday evenings, and for no more than one simple reason: Sunday – as a fact well known, less accepted und much lamented – always and unalterably is followed by Monday, although at some point someone certainly had brought forth the suggestion to move Monday further away from Sunday, so as to make the transition less of an ordeal.

In the meantime, however, with both the Gregorian calendar and the flow of time remaining largely intact, Sunday evening remained the time to remember all the worries one had temporarily left behind the Friday before. And thus, students of all ages all throughout the school withdrew from the parties, the games and their relaxation to pick up their discarded quills and parchments, to try to accomplish what they'd had nearly three days to do in just about three hours instead.

The Hufflepuffs did it with solemn diligence, for they always thoroughly checked on Friday how much time they would probably need to finish all their homework on Sunday; their weekly race against time was, in a sense, frantic by design. The Ravenclaws did it with dignified composure, for they didn't do much else over the weekend anyway; symptoms of precipitance were mainly to be seen whenever someone forgot to stop studying something else to get started on his homework in time, and were – as a general, if unwritten, house rule – frowned upon.

The Slytherins quite simply did it the way they always did it, because they knew they could; even in their haste they managed to look nonchalant, meeting the ticking clock with the exact same arrogant sneer they delighted everybody else with. And then the Gryffindors, of course, always threw themselves into the educational fray for they simply liked the challenge; the question _if_ they could do it by far outweighing the question of _what_ exactly would happen should they not.

Hyperboles and stereotypes put aside, there were of course characters of every kind in each of the four common rooms. In the case of Gryffindor, Ron and Neville commendably played the part of the Hufflepuff, although Ron tended to skip the preparation phase on Friday and instead confined himself to realizing that there was just too much to do in too little time at about nine o'clock in the evening on every Sunday. Hermione, as a matter of course, brought the element of the raven into the lion's den, quietly working in her own corner; her concentration an inspiration to all others, her simultaneous elation a barely accepted nuisance.

In a way, Dean and Seamus were playing both the Gryffindor and the Slytherin part, their confidence more akin to imprudence. Since they omitted the sneering, the others were able to tolerate their flippant attitude, even welcoming the way they managed to make it all look like one big joke sometimes. Quite their own house were, whenever present, Fred and George, who by rights shouldn't even have been there anymore, for they had finished school over a year ago. Yet somehow, obviously against rules and probably even undermining some kind of magical protection, they managed to visit their former classmates now and then; preferably whenever said classmates were in their greatest disarray even without the presence of the two mischievous Weasley twins.

And then, of course, there was that one guy with the raven black hair that never agreed to form into anything that could even remotely be considered fashionable, and with the glasses that had grown with him for what seemed to be the greater part of his life, right in front of emerald green eyes under the best known scar of the whole wizarding world. So, what was his name again?

"Harry, will you please ask Hermione to let me copy her text for our History homework?" a despairing Ron asked the person described above.

Dutifully, Harry turned to the brown-haired, brown-eyed witch sitting next to him, moving her quill with a unique combination of both speed and elegance over a parchment she had stretched out on a heavy tome in her lap, her legs crossed underneath.

"Ron asked me to ask you to let him copy your text for our History homework," Harry told her monotonously.

"Tell Ron if he wants something from me he'd better ask me directly," she answered without looking up from her work.

Harry turned back to his other friend, who was already looking at him expectantly, and said, "Hermione told me to tell you that you should ask her yourself if you want something from her."

Ron nodded his head excitedly, apparently encouraged in his endeavor. He turned to Hermione to address her directly and asked, "Hermione, will you please let me copy your text for our History homework?"

"No," she flatly refused, unperturbedly scribbling away.

Ron groaned and threw his arms in the air in a gesture of defeat. "Seriously, how do they expect us to do all this stuff in so little time?"

"They don't," Hermione replied soberly, without taking her eyes off of her work. "No one expects you to do all your week's homework within ninety minutes on Sunday evening."

The youngest of the male Weasley offspring made a disgruntled face. "It's still too much," he stubbornly insisted. "It's nearly half past eleven and I'm not even halfway through with this. Am I supposed to skip sleep, or what?"

"As tempting as it may be to make you work the whole night through," Hermione said, "you do realize that due to Professor Binns' absence we won't have History again until Wednesday, don't you?"

Silence, with the exception of Hermione's quill continuously moving over the parchment. Ron's facial expression was frozen with his eyebrows raised up to his hairline. Then he blinked – twice.

"Alrighty then," he exclaimed cheerfully, clapping his hands together and abruptly raising from his armchair, neglecting his unfinished homework and leaving it right where it was.

And just like that, he eagerly hurried up the stairs to the boys' dorms as Harry watched him leave with a chuckle.

"You can be surprisingly cruel, you know that?" Harry jokingly asked Hermione when their friend had vanished from sight.

"Why? For letting him do just a little more of his homework, so he will have less to do tomorrow?"

Harry raised an eyebrow at her, even though she still held her eyes fixed on her work. "You do realize you sound like you're talking about a child, don't you?"

The quill came to a sudden halt at that and Hermione pensively raised her head. "Blimey," she breathed in a near-whisper, her expression growing horrified. "I _am_ cruel."

Harry couldn't help but laugh out loud at how shocked she looked in light of that hard-hitting revelation. "Cute is what you are," he told her blithely.

"Oh, stop it," Hermione dismissed his flattery, smiling despite herself. "How far have you gotten with your essay, anyway?"

"Actually, I'm pretty much done already," Harry had to confess reluctantly.

"Really?" Hermione asked with some surprise. "Then what are you still doing here? You could've gone off to bed."

"Oh, I just wanted to finish my…" he began, then trailed off when he noticed the cup of tea he had intended to refer to was already emptied. "Well, I mean I just wasn't tired yet."

Hermione raised an eyebrow in puzzlement. "Your eyes belie your statement, Mr. Potter," she observed, scrutinizing him skeptically. "You look like you're sleeping already with your eyes more or less open. And now that I think about it, I don't believe I've noticed you touching your quill in quite a while."

"I tend to restrain myself from touching my quill in public," Harry replied as matter-of-factly as if he were conducting an interview with the Daily Prophet.

Hermione rolled her eyes at him. "And there's the proof," she declared. "You don't get naughty like that unless you're really tired."

"Don't you like it when I'm… _tired_?" he asked teasingly, receiving a playful slap on his leg as the most immediate response.

"Seriously, what's gotten into you?" she asked, openly amused and yet no less perplexed. "You _really_ should go to bed, Harry."

"Sure thing," he agreed casually. "Yours or mine?"

"Harry James Potter!"

"Okay, okay," he relented, raising his arms in a gesture of capitulation. "But what you told Ron earlier is true for you as well, you know? And I'm not the only one who's tired around here."

"I just want to finish this first…"

"Of course you do," Harry knowingly said. "Now go to bed."

"Mr. Potter," Hermione began warningly, "if you think you can tell me what to—"

"Please?" he softly interrupted her, batting his eyelashes emphatically at her. "Pretty please with sugar on top?"

Hermione snorted. "How very _manly_ of you."

"Anything to get you into bed," he said with genuine, sleepy innocence, only then realizing what he had just said. "Wow, this is getting pathological."

"Indeed," Hermione concurred, shaking her head at him. "I am seriously considering calling for Madam Pomfrey right about now."

"That," Harry began as he raised himself up from the couch, "won't be necessary. However," he said, standing right in front of her with his hands reaching out to her, "I will only go to bed if you do likewise."

She looked up at him with her eyebrows furrowed and her lips turned into a pout.

"Come on, you can do it," he urged her on. "You know I'll just stay here and keep making inappropriate jokes all night, if I have to."

She sighed heavily, and with one part annoyance and three parts amusement, she finally took his hands with her own and let herself be gently pulled onto her feet by him.

"See?" Harry said, smiling pleasantly. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

"Get a room already," someone who passed them by interrupted their exchange. "You two lovebirds make me sick like a Nicholas Sparks novel."

Immediately Harry and Hermione broke their contact and brought some distance between them, the latter maybe just a little more awkwardly so than the former.

"Well, I'm trying, George, but the lady is playing hard to get," Harry replied with playful exasperation, earning a slap on the shoulder from the aforementioned lady.

"What are you guys still doing here anyway?" an irritated Hermione asked the Weasley twins with her arms crossed in front of her chest.

"Oh, just business," Fred replied.

"The usual," George added, opening a window behind him.

Hermione raised a most skeptical eyebrow at them.

"Pranks," they said in unison, and Fred went on to explain, "We made some last finishing touches to next week's selection. Can't have a proper week of school without any pranks, now can you?"

"You do realize Dumbledore is fully aware of your malapropos scheming, don't you?" Hermione asked them with hardly subtle disapproval in the tone of her voice.

"Of course we are," George confirmed nonchalantly, grabbing a broom that had apparently just been hovering outside the window. "The old man even made a few suggestions of his own and challenged us to successfully prank him once within the year."

"We're still in early preparations for that one," Fred confided, then saluted them and promptly jumped straight through the window, reappearing seconds later on his own broom.

"_Malapropos,_" George emphatically repeated while stepping onto the window sill, shaking his head. "Seriously, Hermione. You're so _bourgeois_."

And out he went, following his brother and quickly vanishing in the starlit night sky.

"Unbelievable," Hermione grumbled.

Harry just shrugged it off. "Anyhow," he said. "You still have a bed to go to."

"Which I actually feel quite ready for now," she said. "I'm Head Girl, for Merlin's sake! And here I am letting these scoundrels go about their utterly inappropriate business…"

"Which even Dumbledore is in on…"

"Which doesn't make it any less inappropriate," Hermione insisted. "Honestly, this place is getting more ridiculous with every passing year."

"Yeah, at this rate they'll have Dementors at next year's Halloween party."

Hermione took a deep breath – probably in preparation for saying something very dignified – which she then just exhaled in a deep sigh instead. "I'm not even going to comment on that," she said. "No, I'm officially signing off for today. Have a good night, Mr. Potter."

"Hey," he called out after her when she had already begun ascending the stairs to the girls' dormitories, and then, when she had stopped and turned around to face him, he softly said, "You too."

She just smiled in response, then turned again and quietly went up the stairs, his eyes following her every step until she was no longer to be seen. He sighed the faintest sigh, then walked over to the open window through which Fred and George had so gallantly departed and looked out over the moonlit landscapes surrounding the castle. No matter how accustomed he grew to it, it never ceased to amaze him just how beautiful and perfectly peaceful it was; so far away from his life at Privet Drive and his childhood worries. And yet other worries had taken their place. If only the merest fracture of that peace would find itself reflected in his inner landscapes, he wouldn't dread going to bed so much night after night. Alas, there was nothing he could do but face the nightmares whenever they might haunt him. And recently they had gotten worse again.

He took in another deep breath of cool air and then closed the window. With a last glance towards the slowly fading embers in the fireplace he left the common room via the other staircase, leading to the dormitories for the male half of the students. After having brushed his teeth in the bathroom he finally arrived in the dark and quiet sleeping chamber, his fellow roommates' certain snoring safely trapped behind their closed bed curtains.

It was with a heavy heart that he lay down, for whenever the silent hours came inescapably upon him and he found himself alone again, all the worries and all the doubts crept back into his young heart, burdened so far beyond its years. With obscure visions of a looming fate assaulting him, he kept his eyes shut and tried to focus his mind on better thoughts and brighter places, waiting for sleep to come over him.

And sooner or later it always does.

~**•**~

He felt warm and comfortable; safe and completely at ease. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, but then his consciousness switched on and he began to realize that it was not so. His eyes fluttered open, their lids heavy with sleep and his vision blurred and unfocused. It was still dark around him; early morning maybe, but not dawn quite yet. He made an involuntary attempt to move, but somehow – and oddly so – he didn't seem to be able to, as if something was blocking him. His bed seemed oddly small and confining.

He blinked a few times more to clear his vision as best he could, even though without his glasses there was only so far he could get. With his eyes slowly adjusting to their scarcely lit surroundings, illuminated merely by faint rays of moonlight further dimmed by the long curtains around the bed, he began to make out something right before his eyes, and it certainly did nothing to lessen his drowsy confusion.

Without a doubt there were contours taking shape before him he was puzzled to look upon, and a little light fell on something that even in its blurry form seemed strangely similar to a human face, which was quite impossible considering where he was. Where was he, anyway? Lying on his side, he turned slightly to look over his shoulder to where Ron's bed should be expected to be. Even the thin, semi-translucent silk curtains usually didn't distort Ron to look as if he had long, black hair flowing over his pillows like calm ocean waves shimmering in the silvery moonlight.

_Wait, what? _

He blinked again – quite deliberately this time. Silk curtains? And purple, no less?

_What in Merlin's name…_

He turned around again and rubbed his eyes. He was quite sure, against all better judgment, that he was seeing an all too familiar mane of brown hair, although he was seeing it from a most unfamiliar perspective.

"Hermione?" he heard his voice whisper, and the part of him that listened couldn't quite believe what the other part was saying.

_Impossible!_

He closed the weaker of his eyes to clear up his vision a little more, and while his visual perception improved sure enough, his comprehension of the perceived certainly did not. What he saw made no sense to him at all, and yet there they were; those most familiar features, gentle and relaxed. There she was, right in front him with her eyes closed and the sound of her soft breathing the only thing he was hearing in the silence of the night. Except maybe for the increasingly frantic beating of his heart.

He wasn't alone in his bed. And not only wasn't he alone in his bed, but it was Hermione who was with him. And with another nervous look around he was sure of another alarming fact: it wasn't even his bed he was in!

Suddenly every last remnant of sleep abruptly left him altogether, leaving him wide-awake with his eyes widened in horror.

_Holy hogwash!_

Where he found the presence of mind to not just jump straight up and bolt right through the next best exit – which would very likely have been a window rather than a door – he couldn't have explained, but somehow he did. So instead of making the situation even worse than it already was, he chose to move as slowly and carefully as possible. He cautiously lifted the blanket he had no idea how he had gotten under and tried very hard to refrain from taking in the view that incidentally was thereby revealed. Instead, he watched Hermione's face closely for any sign of what would surely mean nothing but trouble for him, but no such sign was to be seen.

He moved his legs, then followed with his torso when he had found sure footing. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally stood next to the bed, although the realization that he was now standing in the middle of the girls' dorm with nothing but a pair of boxers on his body did not serve to lessen his heart rate. And yet he couldn't help but remain still for a moment, captivated by his best friend's peaceful form. Looking at her bare shoulders and the dangerously flimsy night gown below had a strange effect on him, but whatever that was – he certainly didn't want to pay too much attention to _that_ now – he couldn't just leave without putting the blanket back over her properly. He wouldn't want her to be cold.

He leaned down and gingerly grabbed the seam of the blanket between his finger tips, slowly drew it up over her shoulders with all the fine motor skills he could muster – and then she suddenly shifted a little, moaned feebly and mumbled something unintelligible. Harry froze still, panic-stricken. With his eyes closed, he silently ushered some kind of prayer to whatever cosmic force might be responsible for managing utterly ridiculous situations such as this one. Maybe Schrödinger's cat. And perhaps it worked, for Hermione thankfully remained on her side of the waking life.

Letting out the breath he had been holding for the tense moment now safely passed, he put his sights on the door – the gateway to his safe zone; the exit from this nightmare that under different circumstances might have passed as a dream come true for many a desperate teenage boy. Somehow it seemed to be discouragingly far away. He could have sworn the room had just gotten a little bigger, if for no other reason than to increase his predicament. He wouldn't exactly put it beyond Dumbledore to install such magical mechanisms for precisely that reason either.

With the drumming of his heartbeat filling his own ears he tiptoed his way towards the door, having a hard time to discern if he was walking quietly enough. In a rather ludicrous moment he was quite sure his heartbeat alone would wake up every last person within the room – heck, probably the whole castle! Against this very rational expectation, however, the castle remained in utter ignorance of his stealthy endeavors. Well, not the whole castle.

When he was just a few last steps away from the door, said door suddenly, and in uncomfortable simultaneity with the stopping of his heart, softly opened, leaving Harry petrified in blank horror. Staring right ahead he was bewildered to see no one enter, and after a moment of relief slowly beginning to wash over him and with his heart slowly picking up its rhythm again, he probably would've just walked ahead if he hadn't heard the _Meow! _originating from just below him. Sure enough, there stood Crookshanks, greeting him far too chattily for Harry's taste and looking up at him quite expectantly.

_Oh boy…_

Before he had the time to do much of anything, the cat went on to animatedly rub against his legs, purring with satisfaction. Of all the things he'd never expected to be doing in his life, standing in the girls' dormitories in the middle of the night clad in nothing but his boxers with a cat canoodling his legs surely would have been somewhere at the top of the list, if he had even conceived of the possibility of any such thing happening. Ever. To anyone.

_Yep, this is definitely one of the more bizarre moments of my life. Just imagine the headlines…_

He really had to get out of there.

"_Shoo!_" he made at Crookshanks, speaking so softly that he doubted the cat would even notice it. He waved his hands at him, trying to somehow communicate to him that he'd better move along now.

"This is not the best time for me," he actually whispered at his feline predicament. "It's not like I planned to meet you here, you know? That would be considered creepy in more than one way by most people."

The quadruped seemed unimpressed.

"Honestly now, do you want us to be seen like this? Is that what you want? I don't think the world is ready for this. Frankly, neither am I."

With Crookshanks still happily purring away, Harry sighed in frustration.

"I'm seriously beginning to doubt your understanding of the severity of the situation," he told the cat.

It seemed appropriate to Harry that nothing but an insult to his intelligence was what finally made Hermione's cat move along, although he seemed more satisfied than offended. With the path to his salvation finally cleared, Harry tiptoed the last few steps towards the door and stepped outside into the hallway, not even daring to close the door behind him.

With a deep sigh of relief escaping his lips, everything that had just happened raced through his mind with regained clearness, leaving one fundamental question yet to be answered:

What the Fudge _**had**_ just happened?

~Ω~

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**Annotations & Allusions**

_Nicholas Sparks:_ With the story taking place in the year 1997, it should be noted that Mr. Sparks had only published a single novel at that time, namely _The Notebook_. I confess I have not read a single of his works, but I have seen far too many of the gazillion movie adaptations and _The Notebook_ is actually the only one I found myself able to enjoy without cringing all the time. I think – especially after all the movies based on his novels they keep dishing out – he is so well known that George's joke really just works with his name, and I imagined Mrs. Weasley would be the perfect candidate to add Sparks' works to her collection of Gilderoy Lockhart bestsellers; something that would probably not go unnoticed by the twins. I thought about using Lockhart for the line instead, but I'm not sure he has written any sappy love stories (which is what George is obviously scoffing at), although he would certainly fit the bill. So, it's a semi-anachronism at worst and one I was willing to accept for the sake of accessibility. Also, the comment obviously represents the opinion of the character, not the author. Not necessarily, at least.

_Schrödinger's cat:_ Fully explaining this in a footnote would be a feat I won't even attempt to accomplish, so I'll just say that it's a quantum mechanical thought experiment you might want to google if you are at all interested in such things, and not yet familiar with the concept. If you prefer the short version, just try to imagine a cat in a box that is simultaneously dead and alive. Good luck.


	2. Complications

**Author's Note:** You guys really aren't in a reviewing kind of mood, are you? Well, numbers suggest there are still some people interested enough in reading this, so here's the next chapter. I'm not going to sulk. To paraphrase James T. Kirk: sometimes the needs of the few are reason enough to upload fanfiction.

Anyway, I might as well mention now that, while the story takes place in an obviously non-canonical seventh year, Harry and company will have a _very_ non-canonical schedule with classes they wouldn't normally attend anymore or that wouldn't be relevant for their Nastily Exhausting... that stuff is just too silly to spell out. Let's stick with 'N.E.W.T.', shall we? At any rate, I chose to do that for one simple reason: it's more fun to write (a crazy person's priorities, I know). The canonical Hogwarts curriculum is rather ridiculous anyway, so one might as well mix it up at the very least. So, just as in canon, these kids will go into the real world knowing nothing about anything, but here at least they'll know lots of it.

* * *

**• Chapter II •**

**Complications**

On the next morning Harry still had a hard time wrapping his head around whatever it was that had transpired the night before, and sitting in the Great Hall he was staring at his food as if the answers might be found somewhere therein. When he had woken up – for the second and final time, that is – the incident had immediately felt like a rather bizarre dream to him, and it had taken a few minutes for the realization to set in that it had in fact happened; Crookshanks and everything included. Yet even now a part of him still stubbornly doubted it and questioned his other part's memory, which irritated said part immensely.

"It just doesn't make any sense," he suddenly proclaimed to no one in particular and much to his own subsequent bafflement. When he looked up in embarrassment, he was met with expectably confused gazes.

"What doefn't?" Ron asked with his mouth full of toast. "Breakfaft?"

"Oh, uh…" Harry clumsily began, grasping for a makeshift explanation. "Just a dream I had last night."

In that moment Hermione joined them, bending down right next to Harry to reach for an apple in the fruit basket in the middle of the table, with her other hand resting lightly on his shoulder, oblivious to her unusually startling effect on him.

"I don't believe dreams are to be made much sense of," she remarked rather pleasantly. "They are but children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy."

She snatched the apple she liked best and proceeded to sit down next to Harry, rummaging through her school bag.

"Yef," said Ron, just a little confused. "What fhe faid. If you wanna make fenfe of your dreamf, maybe you fould afk Profeffor Trelawney."

"Oh, there's a good idea," Hermione endorsed sarcastically. "Ask the one person in Hogwarts who has irreversibly taken leave of all her senses to make sense of something."

"Well, what about you then?" Ron challenged her, washing down his mouthful of whatever it was he had now taken a huge chunk out of with a gulp of juice. "You're good at making sense of stuff."

"Why, thank you, Ron," she replied with overacted delight. "Finally someone who appreciates me for who I really am."

Her attention then shifted to the silent boy sitting between them, who seemed to be as busy with his breakfast as one could possibly be without actually touching it.

"It wasn't one of _those_ dreams, was it?" she asked, suddenly concerned for him. "Because I would never dismiss them as—"

"Children of an idle brain?" Harry finished her sentence, smiling weakly and barely looking up at her. "Nah, it was just some… silly… thing."

"I definitely wanna hear that one," Ron said eagerly. "Silly dreams are the best."

"Nah, it's really stupid," Harry refused, shifting in his seat uncomfortably.

"By definition, I would say," added Hermione.

"Come on, mate," Ron nagged impatiently. "Share the fun."

"Stop it, guys. I don't want to talk about it."

There was an insistence in his voice that entailed a sudden silence.

"Oh," made Hermione, a bit taken aback.

"Oooh," made Ron knowingly. "It was one of _those_ dreams."

"What dreams?" asked Hermione, her curiosity instantly sparked. Granted, it never took much for that to happen.

"The only kind of dream you don't wanna talk about in public spaces."

Hermione pondered that for a moment, biting her lower lip, and then slowly said, "Secret dreams?"

For once it was Ron's turn to roll his eyes at his female friend, rather than the usual other way around.

"Yeah. Sure, Hermione. The MI6 is on its way right now to extract the super secret information from Harry's secret dream."

Hermione frowned at him with her lips pursed into a straight line, demanding a serious answer without speaking the words.

"A dirty dream, silly," he said matter-of-factly. "Harry had a dirty dream."

"What?" Harry exclaimed incredulously. "I did not!"

"Relax, mate," Ron told him in between bites. "We all have 'em. It's just that… idle brain stuff, right? Can't take any blame for that."

"But I'm telling you," Harry insisted emphatically, "I didn't have a dirty dream. Would you just stop making up that nonsense already?"

"Oh, I get it," said Ron. "I'm sorry, mate. I get it now."

Harry looked at his friend with utter confusion on his features, while the redhead carelessly went on to help himself to another piece of toast with a generous layer of peanut butter and jam on top. Hermione watched with her nose scrunched up in disgust.

"What?" Harry asked, somewhat irritated. "You get _what_?"

Ron looked up at him with an eyebrow raised in puzzlement.

"Why you don't want to talk about it," he answered, casually licking a drop of jam from his thumb. "It's fine. I get it."

Harry waited another moment for the young Weasley to finally make any sense on his own accord. He didn't.

"I really don't get what you get, _mate_."

Ron looked at him with honest perplexity.

"Seriously?" he asked, even disregarding his breakfast for a moment. "You're really gonna make me spill it all out today, aren't you?"

Harry just looked at him expectantly, while Hermione merely looked back and forth between the two with both her eyebrows raised in the face of this unexpected exchange.

"Well, your dream was about someone who's here," he explained what at least to him was obvious, "and it sure as hell wasn't me. Or Neville."

"What about me?" asked Neville, who sat across from them and had not taken any notice of their conversation up to now.

"I'm just saying that Harry didn't have a dirty dream about you," Ron casually told his fellow Gryffindor.

Neville looked expectably flabbergasted.

"Well, uh," he said, "that's, uh, sure good to know."

"Wait," said Harry, and then paused for a moment of contemplation. "So what exactly are you suggesting?"

Ron looked at him, then switched his eyes to Hermione for a second and then back to him. He paused, pursed his lips in frustration and then repeated the procedure once, this time also nodding his head a little so as to emphasize the point he was silently trying to communicate. It took a second or two, with two puzzled pairs of eyes following his pantomime, but eventually realization set in, and it set in hard.

Four eyes widened, four cheeks flushed crimson and two chests expanded around lungs that took in the sharpest breaths. The other two eyes, two cheeks and one chest had already gone back to breakfast.

"What? Honestly, Ron, where do you even get these ridiculous ideas?" a bewildered Harry challenged him. "I did not have any such dream about Hermione. I would never! That's disgusting!"

An uncomfortable silence ensued between them that even seemed to negate the animated chitchat and clatter of silverware from all around the hall for a moment. Next to Harry, Hermione shifted in her seat, and he was quite sure that she ended up sitting just a little further away from him, but he had a hard time looking at her at all, so he scratched the back of his head instead for a lack of alternatives. Ron had just enough instincts for socially awkward situations to tactfully chew a bit slower.

"Well," Hermione began to announce just a whit too cheerfully, "I'd better be going. It's quite a walk to Professor Vector's classroom."

She hastily gathered her things, including the apple she hadn't even taken a single bite out of yet, and got up from the bench. Without looking at them she said, "I'll see you guys later in Herbology," and with that was marching off towards the great doorway.

Neither of the two remaining friends spoke for a while, and only when even Ron seemed to have finished his breakfast for good did Harry speak up.

"So, what? Hermione is angry at me for not objectifying her and having inappropriate dreams about her? When did that start making sense and why did nobody tell me?"

"Well, I don't know about that," Ron replied hesitantly, "but you basically just called your best female friend disgusting."

Harry thought about that for a brief second.

"I did?"

"Maybe not… what's the word? Explici… tively… ?" Ron shook his head. "Directly, I mean. Maybe not directly. But… sorta, yeah."

"But I only meant to say that it would be disgusting if I were to have such dreams about my best female friend, because… you know?" Harry looked at his non-female friend in search of much needed agreement. To his irritation, the look Ron gave him seemed more akin to pity than anything else. "She's my best friend! It's just not right to think about your friends like that. Not even in dreams. I think."

Ron shrugged, clearly not as convinced by Harry's explanation as Harry would have hoped, which was a real shame because then at least one of them would have been convinced by it.

"Would you not be… I don't know, a little insulted, or maybe disappointed if someone, anyone really, told you straight-out that you are no material for such… thoughts or dreams?" Ron asked him while shoving his emptied plate back a few inches and standing up. "Everyone likes to be… recognized, right? It's only natural. Even for Hermione, I dare say."

"I suppose, but… I don't know," Harry conceded with plain reluctance and joined his friend in standing up. "I think I could very much live with Pansy Parkinson not harboring any such thoughts or having sexual dreams about me."

He shuddered a little even at the mere thought of it.

"Yeah, well," said Ron, shouldering his own worn school bag, "maybe you are not Pansy Parkinson for Hermione."

~•~

Not quite two hours later, Harry and Ron and a mixed group of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws found themselves in front of the locked entrance to greenhouse three, waiting for Professor Sprout to arrive. Harry had spent the greater part of the time since breakfast with thinking, and then also – complementarily to that – with thinking too much. He wanted to apologize to Hermione for his admittedly poor choice of words earlier, yet it turned out to be quite hard to find a sensible way to do so.

He wasn't exactly keen on the idea of telling her that he didn't mean what he had said, because that would imply that he did in fact have sexual dreams about her, which was certainly not true. Simply telling her that he hadn't meant to say that she as a person was disgusting seemed bloody stupid as well, because how flattering could it be, really, to hear that one was not, in fact, disgusting? Like,_ 'Hey, you're not disgusting. Marry me?'_ Whatever potential dialogue he played out in his head, not one of them made an applicable impression to him.

And then, of course, there remained also the fact of the matter that even being anywhere near Hermione felt awfully awkward today. If she knew what had happened last night she'd certainly feel the same. Or if she knew without him knowing that she knew and her knowing that he knew without having the decency to tell her, she'd probably kill him. Or worse, expel him.

But he couldn't just tell her, now could he? He had virtually invaded her privacy without meaning to and without her knowing about it, the former maybe making it a little less bad, but the latter somehow making it much worse in his opinion. He felt like the wizarding equivalent to one of those creepy, despicable date rapists. Just without the actual date. And the rape, of course.

_What the hell is wrong with me?_

"What's wrong with you?"

Harry woke from his stray thoughts with a start and found Ron looking at him with a quizzical look on his face. Rather anxiously he asked, "Did I say any of that out loud?"

"No," Ron slowly answered, eying him suspiciously. "Should I be worried, or just glad?"

When Harry was about to say something in return, his attention instead switched to Hermione and Luna, who were approaching them just in that moment. Hermione merely pressed her lips together in what was surely supposed to be a substitute for a smile, while the moony blonde characteristically greeted them from her own parallel universe while looking up at the sky for no apparent reason. It was a beautifully clear sky, though.

Harry coughed slightly in his best suave efforts.

_I should really heed the casting call for the next James Bond._

"So, how was Arithmancy?" Harry asked as casually as only the next James Bond could.

_That's great, man. Small talk. Just keeping it smooth. _

When Hermione threw him the quickest of glances it made him feel strangely translucent for a brief second. Or maybe naked, although that was just about the last feeling he wanted to have right now.

"Interesting", she replied curtly, appearing to be surprisingly busy with her hands.

"That cloud looks like a wheezing wolpertinger," Luna observed.

The other three simultaneously followed her gaze, and sure enough found a small formation of clouds passing by right above them. To Harry it looked very much like a small white cloud followed by a slightly larger cluster of clouds, but maybe that was just because he had never seen a wolpertinger, wheezing or not.

"It sure does," Ron assessed.

"Definitely," Harry agreed.

Hermione merely breathed a weak sigh.

Just then Professor Sprout finally arrived, greeting her lot of students with her usual, good-humored attitude. The response she received was expectably less enthusiastic. However, Pomona Sprout was not someone to be easily deterred in her naturally good mood, and so she fumbled with her keychain while happily humming some bouncy tune no one else seemed to recognize. Except for Luna, maybe, because why wouldn't she?

With the students expecting Professor Sprout to successfully open the door sometime within the school year, they all gathered around her one by one and thus made it quite impossible for anyone not to move closer to everybody else. Harry and Hermione were no exception. Standing right next to him she threw him a nervous glance, then smiled warmly when she apparently noticed something about him he himself was not aware of.

"Your shirt is all messed up," she said and immediately proceeded to straighten it out with her hands moving across his chest.

On any other day this certainly would have qualified as a perfectly normal exchange between them. Alas, this was not a normal day. In an unfamiliar reflex Harry himself cursed even while it happened, he flinched away from her touch and made an involuntary step backwards, slightly bumping into someone else, who might have said something along the elaborate lines of '_Oi!'_

Her hands froze in mid-air for a second before she hastily retracted them. She looked at him with a mix of plain bewilderment and, to Harry's great dismay, more than a pinch of hurt. Before he could gather his chaotic thoughts and even begin to say anything, the crowd started moving; Professor Sprout had finally opened the door to the greenhouse.

Shaking her head dismissively, Hermione turned and quickly vanished somewhere between plants and people. When even Luna glared at him with something like her own, outlandish version of dreamy disapproval, Harry was sure of at least one thing: he really had messed up now.

Inside the humid greenhouse, with the lesson progressing uneventfully, Harry handled the plant he was supposed to extract some gooey liquid from with uncharacteristically rough motions. He spent more time throwing furtive glances in Hermione's general direction than actually looking at what exactly he was doing, but she had met his eyes only once at the beginning of the class and then not even one more time since then.

"You know, your approach to the task is really interesting," Ron told him, pausing to look at him work. "Here I am trying to use this stupidly delicate syringe to carefully extract single drops of that goo at precisely the right spots without harming the plant, while you are simply squeezing the stuff right out of the poor thing. Same results in less time, if you ask me. Although there's more goo on your hands than in your culture dish."

Harry looked at the mess he had made, the pitiful sight that was the plant and his fingers covered in sticky secretion, and he groaned in frustration.

"This is kind of an off day for me."

Ron couldn't help but chuckle at the scene. "You think?"

He watched Harry as he tried to get the viscous liquid from his fingers with a dry towel, increasingly desperate with every questionable attempt.

"Seriously, though," Ron spoke. "What's eating you today?"

Harry threw him a disgruntled look and went back to his sticky hands.

"Come on," Ron urged him encouragingly. "I'll even believe it if you're gonna insist that it's got nothing to do with a dirty dream."

His friend sighed and threw the ruffled towel back onto the wooden table. He gave Ron another reluctant look, then went to his hair with one of his hands, only to instantly regret that habit.

"Bloody hell," he cursed, now having some of the goo sticking to his black hair as well. He grunted, paused with his eyes closed and only then went on to say, "It wasn't a dream. No dream at all. Of any kind."

Ron didn't look too surprised. "Okay," he said. "I guess it would've had to be a really, _really_ bad dream to cause… well, this."

He gestured towards Harry and the general mess that surrounded him. Harry made a face at him, which Ron took as a good sign. Where there was humor, there was hope.

"So?" Ron asked as Harry showed no clear intentions of actually coming up with any kind of explanation.

Again Harry sighed, clearly at strife with himself.

"Fine," he finally stated after a few seconds of nervously pricking a discarded glove he maybe should have used earlier with a needle for no sensible reason. "If you must know."

"I'm practically forcing you right now," Ron quipped. "We can all agree that you are not telling me by choice."

"Fine, whatever," Harry said, relenting at last. "So here it goes."

Yet nothing went anywhere. After a few seconds of silence, Ron busied himself with puffing up his cheeks and breathing out the air in noisy bursts.

"Here it goes," Harry repeated and then, much to Ron's relief, finally went on to say in a near-whisper, "Last night, I… I was… I mean, I found myself… in the girls' dorm room."

"What?" Ron exclaimed, confused but leaning in conspiratorially anyway. "That's impossible."

"One would think," said Harry. "But apparently… it's not."

"But… what?" Of all the things Ron might have expected, this had certainly not been one of them. "I don't even… why? I mean… why? Scratch that. How?"

"I don't know. It's not like I just went there."

"You didn't?"

"Why would I do that?"

Ron looked at him with round, unblinking eyes. "Are you seriously just asking me that?"

Harry looked right back, no less disbelievingly. "Are you seriously telling me right now that you would just waltz into the girl's dormitories in the middle of the night if it were possible?"

Ron looked to the left, to the right and then back at Harry. "You didn't say anything about the middle of the night."

"Well, it's what I meant. I woke up there."

"What?" Ron exclaimed hoarsely. "What are you talking about? Were you getting wasted in the common room after I was gone or something?"

"What?" Harry echoed his friend. "Of course not! I went to bed as I always do. I fell asleep and then I woke up in Hermione's bed."

Ron's eyes seemed dangerously close to popping straight out of their sockets right about now.

"In Hermione's _bed_?" he practically shouted in a high-pitched voice, utterly incredulous.

"_Ssssh_," made Harry at him, looking around in a downright clandestine fashion.

"What did you do that for?" Ron asked, his voice by now hard to hear even for dogs. Not that there were any of those around.

"Aren't you listening? I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened."

"You mean, like… bloody hell, Harry, you aren't making any sense. Did you guys have sex?"

"What? Of course not!"

Ron looked genuinely lost. "I don't get it."

"One more time, Ron. Just for you," Harry said slowly, calming himself. "I went to bed. _My_ bed._ Alone_. I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night. I found myself in Hermione's bed. She was there. Sleeping. I tried to leave. A furry incident with Crookshanks delayed me. I finally left, unnoticed. I hope. I went back to _my_ bed in _our_ dorm room. I fell asleep again. End of story."

"Crookshanks?" Ron asked, judging by his raddled looks somewhere near the edge of sanity by now.

"That's your question?"

Ron steadied himself with one hand on the table while his other hand went to his forehead. He exhaled a heavy, somewhat unsteady breath.

"So, what?" he said slowly, playing ping pong with his thoughts. "Are you saying you just… like, apparated into… there? While you were sleeping, no less?"

"I really don't know," answered Harry in all sincerity. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

Ron kept shaking his head and rubbing his temples. It didn't seem to help much with whatever it was he tried to achieve by doing it.

"Are you sure it wasn't just a dream?"

Harry gave a nod in confirmation.

"Pity," said Ron, strangely exhausted. "I liked this better when it was just a dirty dream. I would've liked to hear about that."

"It definitely would've been simpler," Harry agreed.

Professor Sprout chose that very moment to declare the class finished for the day, telling her students to safely seal their extracted secretion in their culture dishes. Harry looked at his own dish. There was some gooey stuff in there that might or might not have been the secretion in question, as well as a dead leaf, a loose thread of wool and a few dark flakes of dirt. Somehow he doubted Professor Sprout would be very happy with his results. His plant didn't look very happy, either.

"So, uh, what are you going to do?" Ron asked while they were all busy cleaning up their working spaces and putting their culture dishes into a freezer that, of course, worked entirely without electricity.

"I have no idea," Harry answered glumly, watching Hermione as she diligently put away her tools, carefully carried her plant back to its repository and neatly put her dish into the freezer as well; all the while not once looking his way. "I guess right now I'm pretty much putting my hopes on this being a one-time-only kind of thing."

"You won't even tell Hermione?"

Harry sighed. "I know I should. I have to, eventually. But… it's so crazy, even thinking about talking to her about it seems absurd."

"You can say that again," Ron agreed. "But it would still be better than not talking to her at all, wouldn't it?"

Hermione marched right past them and out through the exit with her eyes kept straight ahead and Harry's eyes following her thoughtfully.

"Yeah," he said sullenly, "and telling her about my stealthy invasion of her sphere of privacy should make for a great conversation piece."

~•~

Harry hadn't done much else all day but think about how best to approach Hermione, yet late in the evening with the day nearing its end he found himself still not having done anything about it, for thinking, as many who are familiar with the concept and more who are not know, is not the same as doing.

He wasn't exactly proud of himself, but in the end he made up his mind to wait another night. If it were to happen again, he would definitely tell her the next day. And if it didn't, well, then he would probably tell her nevertheless, or maybe evaluate the possibility of waiting until his deathbed before telling her. That seemed like a reasonably appropriate moment for it.

Since Hermione had pretty much avoided him for the remainder of the day, it wasn't like he had ample opportunity to talk to her, anyway. It gave him a lot of time to make excuses, though. Suddenly he grew angry. Angry at himself. What was so difficult about this? She was his best friend. No one else had ever had so much natural sympathy and understanding and patience for him – no one.

When he saw her saying good night to a girl from first or second year, he abruptly sprang up from his armchair and strode purposefully towards Hermione, who was just turning away to ascend the stairs to the now much too familiar dorm rooms of the girls.

"Wait, please," he said, and to his relief she did indeed and, standing on the third step of the stairs, turned once more to face him. She looked just a little apprehensive.

"I, uh, I wanted to talk to you before you head off to bed," he told her, scratching first his earlobe and then his jaw-line. And then his nose a little.

Hermione looked at him expectantly, remaining silent.

"Right," Harry said, nodding to himself. "So, today really sucked. As far as days go. Which at least for me was because you weren't really part of it. Which was entirely my own fault, but… it still sucked. And I wanted… I needed to apologize to you for that. I know I behaved a little strangely today, but I didn't mean to push you away. And I certainly didn't mean to say that you are in any way, shape or form disgusting. If disgusting were the only adjective in the English language, I would still not use it to describe you, because it would be no less ridiculous.

"I really just had a bad day, and yes, there's a reason for it. But it was difficult for me to deal with it and I couldn't find a way to talk to you about it, which really happens very rarely, or more like never. But it did today, and when I'll finally tell you what all of this was about, you'll understand why I behaved so stupidly about it. It's nothing serious, you don't have to worry. It's just… ludicrous, really, and truth be told more than a little embarrassing for me.

"I know how this must sound, but all I really want to say is… I'm sorry, Hermione. And I hope we can say good night to each other like we always do, sleep this silly day off and talk about it tomorrow. I'll tell you everything, I promise. I'm even inclined to believe that we'll just have a good laugh about it, even though I spent all day going through all these worst case scenarios in my head over and over again. Only now I seem to realize that you've never been a worst case for me. You're the best."

A silence ensued that at least as far as Harry was concerned seemed rather deafening, and slowly but surely had an increasingly awkward quality about it. He was beginning to feel very self-conscious and by now his lengthy monologue seemed like one, big stream of empty blabbering to him and—

Then he was suddenly caught in the fiercest embrace he could imagine, forcing him to make a step backwards to keep his balance while also holding on to Hermione, who seemed to be entirely wrapped around him, although she was still standing on tiptoe on the third step of the stairs with her legs outstretched behind her.

"Just to avoid any misunderstanding here," said Harry when he had regained some air in his lungs, "this is not your very original way of telling me to bugger off, is it?"

She laughed against his shoulder, her breath tickling him on his neck.

"No, it's not," she said happily. "This is merely my first attempt of trying to make you understand that you just gave me one of the best apologies I was ever lucky enough to receive."

"Really?" Hearing that made Harry feel ridiculously good, and just a little bit proud.

"Really," she affirmed. "It's probably second only to defeating a mountain troll for me, which admittedly also served to save my life, but still qualified as an apology in my book."

"Well," Harry said, playfully turning from side to side and swinging Hermione with him, "There don't seem to be any trolls around right now."

She laughed again.

"I won't hold that against you, then," she granted. "But you owe me a troll."

Now it was Harry's turn to laugh.

"Would it count if I knocked out Crabbe and Goyle instead?"

He helped her back to her standing position and saw her smiling down at him, the reflections of the candle light dancing brightly in her eyes.

"There are undeniable similarities," she allowed. "But I should warn you, Harry Potter. I'm not easily deceived."

"I believe that," he replied. "Not many could differentiate the common troll from Vincent Crabbe. It takes a trained pair of eyes."

She sighed, her smile undiminished and entirely unconnected with Vincent Crabbe, or trolls for that matter.

"Thank you, Harry," she said quietly, and he reciprocated her smile.

"So, are you gonna wish me a good night now?" he asked in his most boyish demeanor.

Her smile got just a little brighter yet again.

"Yes," she said. "Good night, Harry."

"Good night, Hermione."

Slowly she turned around and went up the stairs, and Harry was somewhat surprised to find himself unable to overlook the gentle sway of her hips. Instantly feeling like the biggest pervert in human history, he turned around and made his way to his own dorm, feeling so content that it was hard to believe the day had gone the way it had. But all's well that ends well, it seemed to him, and so in his memory this day was, in the end, a good day.

It was with happiness and confidence that he lay down that night, and not even the fact that he pretty much dreaded tomorrow when he would have to tell Hermione about _the incident_, did much to lessen his mood. His eyelids slowly fell shut with boon rather than bane, and the smile on his lips barely faded even while he gently slipped away into the realm of dreams.

~•~

The corridor was pitch black, save for some light coming from a door that stood ajar at the other end. Not even the candles were burning, and only the metallic frames of the pictures on the walls, reflecting even the faintest of lights, served to give any discernible shape to the hallway. Harry moved ahead and felt the ground change under his bare feet, from rough, cool stone to slightly warmer, soft carpet, muffling his footsteps in an otherwise dead silent environment.

The door came closer and the light grew brighter, enabling him to discern its features more clearly. He raised a hand to reach for his glasses, but found them missing. There was a sound coming from the room, he was sure. It was a constant, rushing sound, like that of running water; growing louder with every step he made. When he was just a few more meters away from the door, he noticed swathes of water vapor billowing from the gap between door and frame.

Then, all of a sudden, it was silent again and a few rapid, airy waves went through the flimsy clouds of steam. He was nearly within arm's reach of the silver door handle and able to catch a glimpse of the room beyond, all blurred in white. Tentatively he reached out and gently put his hand on the wet metal. He gave the door one careful push and it quietly swung wide open in one smooth motion, revealing what lay behind. Something seemed to have dropped to the floor, and it might have been Harry's jaw. His eyes went wide as they were directed downwards, and then slowly moved up over the sight they beheld.

There stood a young woman on white shining marble floor amidst translucent clouds of hot vapor, one bare leg slightly bent, the other straight. One hand rested lightly on her thigh, the other lead a white towel over her long neck and the back of her head in slow, circular motions. Her perfectly smooth skin shimmered wetly, a thousand glinting drops of water reflecting the light from all around her while slowly giving in to gravity; running down her gentle surfaces and playing around the heavenly curves of her female form.

A single drop of water ran straight down from her neck, running its course like a dallying river in between the molds of her bare breasts, ever downwards to where her belly button lay in waiting to swallow it in rapture. Further below, one playful swathe of steam girdled her center; teasingly revealing no more than vague contours of what lay hidden beneath.

And up above, her head rested on her delicate shoulders, inclined to the side, letting the auburn waves of her long hair flow freely in the gentle currents of the steamy air, with single drops of water running their course along their lines and finally falling from the tips down onto the ground, where they vaporized in an instant with a soft, sizzling splash.

"Hermione?" he croaked in a thin voice, unable to close his mouth.

Only now taking note of him, she looked up at him, and the burning embers of her eyes reached right through him. He gulped.

"Hey, Harry," she greeted him in an unfamiliarly husky voice. "You are just a minute too late."

He blinked in incomprehension. It did not improve his presence of mind when she casually let her towel drop to the floor, swirling up the vapors encircling her.

"Well," she said, "Now that you have seen me, I believe it could only be considered fair if you were to repay me likewise."

When she went on to slowly, deliberately move towards him, with every elegant step on her slender feet rich with sensual undercurrents, Harry found himself in desperate need of another throat he could gulp with, for his own felt awfully dry and suffocating right now.

She came to a halt just an inch away from him, looking up at him with a look that made his legs feel like very long, unstable, silly things.

"What do you say," she softly said, enticingly circling over his chest with her index finger, "should we move this to the bedroom?"

Involuntarily his eyes flickered downwards, catching a glimpse of her shapely breasts that were less than an inch away from being pressed against his chest, and the sight of them made him feel very light-headed, to say the least. To his puzzlement, he noticed how there were no drops of water left on her fair skin.

"You're dry," he heard himself say like an idiot.

In response, he saw a smile playing around the corners of her mouth the likes of which he had never seen on her before. And then she gave him that look again. Standing on tiptoe she leaned further into him, and with her soft breasts brushing lightly against his chest and her lips right next to his ear – her breath tickling him most electrifyingly – she hoarsely whispered, "Not entirely."

"Hermione…" he couldn't help but rasp, succumbing to his arousal.

"Harry?" she asked, suddenly sounding strangely confused.

"Hermione?" he asked, now equally perplexed.

He opened his eyes, even though he couldn't exactly remember closing them. His vision was blurry and it seemed oddly dark around him, and not nearly as hot and humid as it had been a mere second earlier. He sat up. Wait, he had been lying? Why was that? Someone else sat up beside him, and that was strange too. He turned his head to look who it was and found a pair of dark eyes widened in blank horror staring right back at him, surrounded by a wild mane of long hair.

"_**HARRY?!**_" she practically screamed.

Within the most horrifying instant of realization, his eyes mirrored hers, and with a surprisingly strong bounce he leaped out of bed straight from his sitting position, yelling, "Bloody hell, bloody hell! I'm sorry!" more than once; noticing that, again, he had nothing but his boxers on him; trying to cover himself and then feeling silly for it; then realizing he had an unwelcome condition down there and thus covering himself again; stepping on what turned out to be Crookshanks' tail, who jumped up with a violent hiss and made Harry jump in horror as well, and also yelling "Sorry!" yet again; and then making off towards the door with an apologetic look at Hermione, who sat dumbstruck in her bed with one side of her night gown hanging somewhat loosely from her shoulder, which – as Harry somehow found time to observe even while clumsily stumbling towards the exit after having bumped his foot against the much harder foot of the bed – made her look awfully adorable.

Finally having reached the door, he vehemently wrenched it open and was about to pretty much lunge outside when, instead, he managed to trip over his own, hurting foot and plunged straight to the ground, barely able to get his hands up in time to avoid landing right on his face. With the air roughly taken out of his lungs, he lay right on the threshold with his torso outside in the corridor and his legs still in the dorm room, remaining still for just a moment of respite.

"Harry?" he heard Hermione ask again, concern mixed into her undiminished confusion.

"I'm okay," he croaked."I'm just gonna go now, if it's alright."

He began to push himself up, a little at first. Then, when he was just about to bring himself back into a standing position with one last effort, he suddenly felt the most violent force pushing through his body from behind and underneath him. Before he had any time to even question what was happening, he felt himself being flung into the air with his legs suddenly above him and his torso following in a most involuntary somersault, that – sadly – was not entirely finished before he crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway with his back. Upside down.

He fell hard to the ground with his shoulders, the impact sending one last cascade of pain through his body, finally leaving him with what was pretty much just an accumulation of pain everywhere. Without having much time to assess his inarguably subpar situation, he heard a familiar _plop!_ to his left and, looking up from his twisted position, saw Professor McGonagall looking down at him with an expression that not even from his awkwardly inverted perspective could even remotely be considered amused.

"I swear," said Harry with all the innocence he could muster, "this never happened before."

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_Children of an idle brain:_ This isn't me going crazy with my beloved fancy language, this is Hermione quoting from William Shakespeare's_ Romeo and Juliet_; Act I, Scene 4, wherein Mercutio says, "True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy […]"

_Harry's last line:_ That one's actually very much inspired by no other than Joey Tribbiani from the TV show _Friends_; Season 7, Episode 20. Slightly different context, though.


	3. Repercussions

**Breaking News:** The devil! The details! I literally just realized that I apparently put Luna into seventh year, since she was obviously amongst the Ravenclaws that joined the Gryffindors for their Herbology class in the previous chapter, which is all the funnier considering I explicitly state that she will be attending Hogwarts for another year at a later point in the story. As is stands, I really don't think I want to change anything about either scene, so I guess we'll just have to say that sixth and seventh year students were put together for some very special kind of Herbology class, if you guys could live with that. Or we could also just lose our collective minds about it. I'm always up for that.

**Actual Author's Note:** It seems my non-sulking really served to elicit some more reviews from you guys, huh? Just imagine the gushing response if I actually _were_ to sulk! I'm not going to, though. I'm fine.

Seriously, now. Not being the most social person myself, I can completely understand people who read without reviewing. I hardly ever left reviews in my most active fanfiction reading days, and while I feel kind of bad for it today since I know how good it can make you feel when you see something you created being appreciated by others, I'm honestly thankful for every single person who simply reads and enjoys stuff I write. Reading about it is nice, but not necessary. Just knowing that they are out there is quite special by itself. And I know the silent ones. I get you. It's all good. Except for those who are just being lazy! Come on, you guys! … kidding.

So, at any rate, I've mentioned it prior to the last chapter, but in this one my utter disregard for the canonical order of things gets even more blatant. While Apparition training is based on age rather than school year in canon, here it's simply taught in seventh year, under different circumstances and by a Hogwarts Professor who's just fun to write rather than a Ministry official nobody cares about. Scandal! Disaster! Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

Or, alternatively, enjoy if at all possible.

* * *

**• Chapter III •**

**Repercussions**

A teacher's personal study is hardly ever a comfortable place to be in for any student of any school, for there is hardly ever a reason to be there besides trouble. For Hermione Granger, things tended to be a bit different, for she really only ever found herself in trouble whenever her friends got her into it, and so instead she had spent quite a few pleasant hours in this very room over the years, having many a cultivated discussion or even plain, amicable conversations with the good professor. About philosophy, the history of wizarding and Muggle culture, Hogwarts in general or the curriculum and Hermione's numerous ideas to improve it; even about their lives in- and outside of the school. About Harry and Ron, and Harry; her fears and worries that, somehow, more often than not ended up revolving around him.

Minerva McGonagall had very much become a person of trust for Hermione, someone to confide in. The older woman had once told her that under different circumstances she would be apprehensive about keeping such an unusually close relationship to a student, but since Hermione always had perfect grades as it were, there wasn't much room for the professor to favor her in any inappropriate way.

Therefore, on most occasions Hermione would have surely felt invited and comfortable here, and not the least anxious or embarrassed. Alas, this was not one of those occasions.

There she sat on a chair that never before had made her feel so queasy, wrapped in a blanket with nothing but her night gown underneath. Next to her, on a second chair identical to hers, sat Harry, who even under McGonagall's furious eyes had been resourceful enough to summon a shirt from his own dorm before following the seething professor into her study. Other than that, however, he only wore his boxers and a pair of slippers, which he seemed to be very aware of.

In front of them, behind her neatly organized desk, sat Professor McGonagall, scribbling away on a piece of parchment with unusually rough, decisive strokes; the sharp scratching sounds of her quill the only noise to disturb the silence in the dimly lit room. Harry and Hermione threw each other a fleeting sideways glance, but each of them looked away just as quickly.

A sudden _thump!_ made them both jump in their chairs and violently jerked them out of their thoughts. Professor McGonagall had pushed a drawer shut without the slightest effort to be easy on either wood or the teenagers sitting before her. She looked at them for the first time since they had entered her study minutes ago, but now she did nothing but and bore right into them with those piercing eyes of hers, wherein the flames of the candles on her desk appeared to flicker most dangerously. Even though the warm light illuminated her tired, sleep-deprived features and she herself wore a strikingly colorful dressing gown over her regular sleeping attire, she somehow managed to not look any less threatening.

"So," she said, and rarely had that single syllable sounded sharper, "would anyone care to explain to me what exactly happened here?"

Harry and Hermione threw each other another glance, unsure of who should speak and what should be said. Hermione was only here right now because she hadn't wanted for Harry to go alone and had vaguely insisted to Professor McGonagall that she was somewhat involved in what had happened, though to be perfectly honest she didn't even understand what exactly _had_ happened, let alone if or how she was actually involved.

"My patience is wearing thin," Professor McGonagall warned them icily.

Harry cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. "Well," he began hesitantly, "this really isn't what it looks like, Professor."

"Is that so, Mr. Potter?" she practically cut him off. "Because from my perspective it seems to be exactly what it looks like."

Harry rubbed his neck, which still felt pretty sore after his close encounter with wall and floor. "So, uh, what does it look like, exactly?"

McGonagall took in a sharp breath, her nostrils flaring. "Such… reprehensible behavior. By two of my most exemplary students, no less. I am shocked. Shocked!"

"I… I really think there's some sort of misunderstanding here, Professor," Harry tried carefully.

"Yes," Hermione spoke up, if somewhat meekly at first, "we didn't do anything, Professor McGonagall."

"Oh?" the professor snapped at her. "Is that what they call it these days?"

Another clueless look was exchanged between Harry and Hermione, yet when their eyes met McGonagall's meaning finally dawned on them, and they hastily turned their heads again.

"Professor McGonagall!" Hermione protested, sorely shocked herself now. "We did not do any such thing, and I find the accusation alone rather preposterous!"

Harry was surprised enough at Hermione's reaction alone, but when he saw how suddenly it was their teacher's turn to look abashed, he was even more perplexed.

"Oh," McGonagall said, rubbing the back of her hand with a nervous finger. "I see. No, actually I don't. You told me you were _involved_, Miss Granger."

"Yes," Hermione admitted slowly, "because it was my bed he was in."

"Excuse me?"

Even in the flickering candle light Hermione's blushing was, against her inner hope, quite visible.

"That's where I found Harry when I woke up," she hastily explained. "And that's as far as my involvement goes."

Professor McGonagall raised her eyebrows, making her glasses slip an inch down her nose. Harry cleared his throat uneasily, instantly drawing the professor's attention back to him.

"Hermione," Harry mumbled, feeling the blood rush to his head, "You aren't exactly making me look good here…"

"But I just meant—"

"Would someone around here please start making sense?" Professor McGonagall cut her off.

Both teenagers shrunk back into their chairs. After a moment of tense silence, McGonagall eyed Harry with an outright inquisitorial look.

"Were you, or were you not within the confines of the seventh year girls' dormitories tonight, Mr. Potter?"

Mr. Potter gulped. "Yes."

"And were you, or were you not in Miss Granger's bed?"

Harry hesitated, unable to recall ever having felt more embarrassed. His head felt so hot he thought it should be melting by now.

"Yes," he nonetheless said truthfully.

"And what exactly were you doing there?"

For the first time this night, Hermione watched him intently, too interested in what he had to say to pay much mind to the generally embarrassing nature of the whole situation.

"Sleeping?" Harry said with an innocence in his voice that was so genuine it actually managed to seem feigned again.

Rarely had the Professor's notoriously thin lips looked thinner, and no blood seemed to be left in them at all.

"Let us pretend we are all willing to believe that for a moment," McGonagall said doubtfully. "That still leaves the very pressing matter of how you managed to breach the magical security measures that are, as is well known, installed around the girls' dormitories, making it impossible for any male student to enter them, and why exactly you would walk into someone else's bed to sleep therein."

"Wait," said Harry pensively. "So male _teachers_ actually _can_ enter them?"

"Mr. Potter!"

"Sorry," he apologized ruefully. "What I meant to say was I didn't breach them. Not consciously, at least."

The professor raised an eyebrow at him. "Would you care to elaborate?"

"I wish I could," Harry answered sincerely. "But there isn't much I can tell you. I went to bed as I always do – my own bed, mind you – and fell asleep. When I woke up, I was in… in Hermione's bed. Instead of mine."

Professor McGonagall looked at him unblinkingly, scrutinizing him intensely.

"So, we are talking about spontaneous, subconsciously triggered Apparition into magically sealed and protected areas," she said tonelessly.

Harry shrugged his shoulders. "Sounds about right."

He flinched when the professor huffed loudly in frustration.

"That is not a thing, Mr. Potter!"

Harry looked over to Hermione in search for help, but even she looked disturbingly stumped.

"It's not?" he asked, facing Professor McGonagall again.

"No," she flatly replied. "I'm disappointed to say the barrier has been breached before, in recent years only by some especially… inventive scoundrels, but it happens less than once per decade. At least since Professor Dumbledore was named Headmaster. Not once, however, did anyone manage to apparate into an area that was protected against it by any competent witch or wizard."

"But you apparated there," Harry remarked. "Right after… my impromptu gymnastics."

"I'm a staff member, Mr. Potter, and it was the hallway, not the dorm room," the professor explained. "Would you want Madam Pomfrey to climb the gazillion steps of the castle every time there was a medical emergency in one of the common rooms?"

Harry merely mumbled something along the lines of "_I'm the one with the blunt trauma here,"_ and sunk back into his chair.

Professor McGonagall exhaled a heavy sigh. "And you are absolutely sure that you had nothing to do with this?" she asked Hermione, giving her the same scrutinizing look she had given Harry before.

"Yes, of course not," Hermione answered, drawing the blanket around her just a little tighter, then adding in a sheepish voice, "Why would I do that?"

McGonagall gave her another kind of look over the frame of her glasses. "Uh-huh."

She took her quill from its inkpot again and wrote something on her parchment, and while continuing to write and without looking up at them asked, "Was this the first time this happened?"

"Yes," Hermione immediately replied.

Harry, however, remained conspicuously quiet, and two seconds later the professor's scribbling stopped dead and she looked up at him. He was playing around in his unruly hair with one hand and looking towards the ground with an expression that under different circumstances would have made Hermione laugh. Now it merely served to make her very, very suspicious.

Feeling both women's eyes on him, Harry wanted to sink even deeper, but the stupid solid matter of the chair made that quite impossible. He coughed once or twice.

"Well," he began very slowly, dreading every word he had to add. "That whole thing with the violent ejection was definitely new, but, uh, technically… in principle… the other thing, with the impossible Apparition stuff, well, that… also happened the night before."

Harry threw Hermione a timid glance and found her gaping at him in utter disbelief. "But only that once," he hastily added. "So, uh, now twice."

That did not stop the gaping. "I'm sorry," he said, looking at her apologetically. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about… today. I couldn't know it would happen again…"

Professor McGonagall harrumphed and the two abruptly turned back to her. "I take it Miss Granger did not wake up to take note of your presence in… her bed the first time?"

Hermione was barely able to shake her head in what seemed to be a trance-like state.

"And you," the professor asked Harry, "managed to leave unnoticed?"

He nervously scratched the back of his head. "It really doesn't sound very decent when you say it like that," he murmured.

"I have yet to decide if anything about this can be called decent," the professor assessed.

"But I didn't do it on purpose," Harry said, much more emphatically this time. "It just happened. I was just as confused as we all are now, probably more so. And nobody is more embarrassed by any of this than I am. But I did not break into the girls' dormitories like some pervert. I didn't even breach any barriers, I was flung into a bloody stone wall by one! Thanks for asking, by the way. I'm fine."

He crossed his arms over his chest, somewhat defiantly.

"Calm down, Mr. Potter," McGonagall told him, a touch of sympathy permeating her strict demeanor. "I believe you, and I can assure you that at no point during this affair did I mean to insinuate moral misconduct on either your or Miss Granger's part. It is not for me to judge you in that regard, at any rate. What falls under my responsibility to deal with, however, is the obvious infringement of Hogwarts rules and, as it seems, the rather peculiar and as of yet inexplicable manner in which it transpired.

"Hence my necessary interrogation. Even though any sort of punishment is currently not applicable given the state of affairs, both of you, I'm sure, will understand that, with the information provided by Mr. Potter, I cannot keep this incident under non-disclosure, either. I will have to consult with the Headmaster and those professors involved in the security measures that have been negated in an unprecedented manner. And you, Mr. Potter, as sorry as I am to say this, will probably have to become the subject of some sort of examination eventually."

If Harry would have had another pair of arms at his disposal, he would have crossed those too right now.

"Great," he just grumbled through clenched teeth.

Professor McGonagall looked at them for another moment, then said, "For now there is nothing that can be done about this. I will call upon you as soon as I have discussed the matter with the staff," and looking at Harry she said, "You may leave, Mr. Potter. Get some more sleep, which we are all in dire need of."

Harry nodded slowly and stood up without another word, simply feeling too exhausted to talk anymore. With a last shy glance towards Hermione, who was wrapped in her blanket up to her nose and looking anywhere but at him, he turned and walked to the door with scuffing steps.

"In your own bed, if it is at all convenient," McGonagall added when Harry was just about to step out into the corridor. With slumped shoulders he left, closing the door behind him with a sigh.

A rather forlorn looking Hermione was left wondering in apprehension why she was not dismissed as well, her concern only lessening a little when Professor McGonagall gave her a warm smile, probably very aware of her student's almost haggard condition.

"Miss Granger," she said, "I will have to ask of you to inform me promptly about any further developments and obviously any potential recurrence of an event even remotely akin to what happened tonight. I will bring this to the Headmaster's attention as soon as he returns from London, but until then there is only so much we can do."

"Of course, professor," Hermione acceded naturally. "But why would you tell me this in private, if you don't mind my asking?"

To her puzzlement, the professor looked oddly bashful, fidgeting with her quill and, for once, avoiding eye contact. She cleared her throat.

"Well," McGonagall said, plainly flustered, "call me old-fashioned, and please note that I have the utmost respect for Mr. Potter and never had a student I was fonder of, but… he _is_ a boy. And, well, let me put it this way, hormones don't help honesty."

It was Hermione's turn to blush and sink just a little deeper into her woolen wrap. Nervously sweeping a stray strand of hair back behind her ear she said, "I really don't think that hormones play much of a roll in any of this, professor."

"Oh?" McGonagall looked up at her, then – although Hermione couldn't quite be sure – seemed to smile the weakest, secret smile, and going back to her deskwork said, "Well, if you say so."

~•~

The great thing about dormitories, as Harry and Hermione were lucky enough to independently learn the following day, was that, regardless of whether magical barriers were preventing one gender to enter the dorm rooms of the other or not, it was virtually impossible to do so without the whole school finding out about it. Sure, everyone had their magically sound-proofed bed curtains, but those worked only to block outgoing sounds, so that everyone would be able to fall asleep without having to suffer a cacophony of multiple snoring throats torturing one's eardrums. Sounds from the surrounding dorm room itself were very much able to reach anyone behind their curtains, and so it was as unlikely that anyone would be able to pull off the hubbub Harry and Hermione – and Crookshanks – had caused the night before without waking every other person in the room as it would be in a completely mundane, Muggle dormitory.

So much for the advantages of attending a school of magic.

Considering the girls Hermione had the pleasure of sharing a dorm with, the phenomenon itself might not have come as the biggest surprise, but the speed at which the rumors spread throughout the school, and even more so the multitude of forms they took, did not fail to astound. Even on his way to the Great Hall early in the morning, having overslept no more than a quarter of an hour, Harry was already met with more than one nosey gaze, a few pointing fingers and some especially irritating giggling behind raised hands. None of that, as Harry had yet to find out, was more than a light introduction to the things to come.

In Hogwarts, the Great Hall was to gossip what airports are to viruses, although mutations are much more common among the former. When Harry arrived things still appeared to be agreeably normal, for the most part. Not a single head seemed to turn his way from any of the house tables except for Gryffindor. Passing his fellow house mates on his way to his usual seat, he practically silenced every conversation he came upon with his presence alone, only for the excited chatter to pick right up again once he had moved barely two steps along. Desperately trying to ignore the whispers and the glances, he finally arrived at his place next to Ron. Quickly letting his eyes wander about in search for Hermione, he found her nowhere to be seen, and for once he wasn't quite sure if it was disappointment he felt, or relief.

Sitting down he exhaled noisily and avoided looking at anything that might look back, wishing he could just vanish into thin air. From the corner of his eye he noticed Ron gawking at him with unswerving attention, chewing on his food incessantly. Harry rolled his eyes and gave off an unnerved groan.

"So I take it you've heard, too?"

"Hermione shares a dorm with Lavender Brown, mate," Ron answered, blatantly amused. "Everyone's heard."

"Brilliant," Harry said flatly. He took a careful look around the Hall again, then worriedly asked, "Surely not everyone?"

"Nah, not yet," Ron answered good-naturedly. "But it's not even eight o'clock. See over there?" He nodded towards another part of the table, a dozen heads away from them. "See how Parvati Patil is leaning over to her sister at the Ravenclaw table?"

Harry saw. Harry didn't like what he saw.

"Yep," Ron commented solemnly, "and that's how privacy dies."

Harry's head plopped straight into his crossed arms on the table, a muffled and thus luckily unintelligible tirade of curse words escaping from underneath the pile of misery that was Harry Potter in that moment.

"Have some cereal," said Ron. "It's delicious."

Harry raised his head, if only to throw his friend an appropriately angry look.

"Have you seen Hermione?" he asked, ignoring all things cereal-related.

"As a matter of fact I have," Ron answered. "She was here just a few minutes ago, but apparently some Head Girl stuff came up and she had to leave."

Harry doubtfully raised an eyebrow at him.

"Convenient, I know," Ron admitted. "But it's true. Maybe it's karma or something."

"What about my karma, then?" Harry asked sulkily. The pitiful look he received in return wasn't exactly comforting in nature.

"You're the bloke who apparates into unsuspecting maidens' bedrooms," Ron told him blithely. "Your karma's pretty much on its way to being written on a wanted poster in a six-figure number."

The day did not improve from there. Merely fifteen minutes later, when the Great Hall was slowly clearing and, at some point, Harry and Ron were amongst those stepping through the high arching two-winged door out into the entrance hall, the frequency of disturbances had already increased significantly for Harry. By now so many people were throwing more or less clandestine glances his way or sometimes even outright staring at him that he felt thrown right back into his first few weeks at Hogwarts, when he had empirically learned what animals in zoos must feel like.

Many of the boys merely nodded or winked at him in what seemed to be some sort of acknowledgment, others combined their nodding with a knowing smile that supposedly was meant to tell him something, although he wasn't sure what it was. Others, quite to the contrary, appeared to be kind of angry at him for some reason unknown to him. He was bewildered to see even some of those he tended to be rather friendly with were giving him wary looks, and Cormac McLaggen was blatantly seething with rage when he saw him passing by in a hallway. One phenomenon he at least could easily shrug off, since Harry had never much liked the bloke, anyway.

The girls, to Harry's increasing irritation, were not that different in their general behavior; the variables changing, the formula staying the same. There were many who didn't seem to do anything but giggle whenever they saw him, but more than a few of those he had never seen do much but giggle, anyway; over him, over everybody else and, ironically enough, probably never over themselves. But – and he really couldn't say which group he preferred – there were also those who seemed to be mildly annoyed, positively resentful or outright upset with him. At one point he saw someone with a striking resemblance to Ron's little sister running up a flight of stairs, sobbing violently. Harry strictly refused to believe that could have anything to do with him, but he was getting seriously paranoid by that point.

It might have been Harry's personal epitome of irony that today, of all days, marked their first official lesson in Apparition. Had that not been the case, leaving the confines of the castle – that today possessed a distinctly suffocating quality – at half past eleven with Ron and Neville by his side surely would have been a welcome relief, especially on this particularly pleasant late summer day; a mild sun giving its last farewells to its longest days over the northern hemisphere and a refreshing wind bringing the first gentle signs of cooler times to come.

Now, however, the irony seemed downright obscene to Harry. Not only would it be their first Apparition lesson, but he would also very likely see Hermione for the first time since their rather unpleasant sojourn in Professor McGonagall's study the night before. To top it all off they were also paired with the Slytherins, as for some sadistic reason it so often seemed to happen. Harry's last remaining glimmer of hope was that at least they would get a good teacher who would not make this any worse for him than it already was, like—

_Snape._

"Are you kidding me?" Harry groaned in equal frustration and disbelief when he saw who was expecting them from a distance. "Have I insulted the whole bloody cosmos or something?"

"I hope you didn't apparate into Snape's mum's bed as well," Ron said flippantly. "Wait, does Snape even have a mum?"

"Of course," Neville replied. "Who else would be doing his laundry?"

"Kill me now," said Harry, but no one did.

When they arrived where most of the other students had already gathered, Hermione amongst them, Snape eyed Harry with an ominous smirk. Harry ignored him and instead moved a little closer towards Hermione as casually as he could. Trying to talk to her under Snape's supervision would have been foolish, though, so getting her attention would have to serve for now, and when she finally looked at him he was dismayed to see how harried she looked. It seemed her day hadn't been much better than his up to now and he could only imagine the kind of gossip she had to deal with. Even though a billion neurons told him he should be embarrassed to even look upon her, the bold few neurons who made him give her his most comforting smile, trying to let her know that she wasn't alone, were his favorites. He was glad to see her reciprocate his smile, unsteady as it was.

"Your attention, _please_," Snape's voice jerked them out of their moment; cutting enough, as always, to make it unnecessary for him to speak very loudly to be heard – his natural ability to keep all other mouths around him shut tight doing its part as well.

"As you all know, this will be your first lesson in the advanced discipline of Apparition," Snape went forth in his familiar drawl, "challenging for the adept, dangerous for the uninitiated and potentially fatal for the perpetual amateurs amongst you."

"He should do his own motivational program," Ron mumbled under his breath while pretending to scratch his nose.

"_Some_ of you, as has come to my attention," Snape continued with overt smugness, "have already gathered some _experience_ in the field."

A snicker went through the crowd. Hermione seemed to diminish in size a little, while Harry made another instinctive step towards her.

"It is my responsibility to try and bring all of you to the same level as those pioneers amongst you," Snape spoke, relishing every syllable, "who seem just _too_ _eager_ when it comes to _certain_ _things_ in life."

Some of the Slytherins laughed out loud at that, while the Gryffindors remained unanimously quiet, their animosity towards the Slytherins outweighing their own amusement with the rumors going around the castle. Even Lavender Brown gave a commendably solidary performance, but Lavender Brown was one of those poor creatures who always dance along and never set the rhythm.

"In today's lesson," Snape went on, strangely enough never really savoring the reactions he always seemed so determined to provoke from his Slytherin students, "we will be going through the theoretical basics of the procedure and then, in the end, hopefully have some of you, or at least _parts_ of some of you, in that marked area over there."

As usual, Snape was annoyed when he noticed a raised hand in the group of students, disrupting his beloved monologues.

"Yes, Miss Granger?" he asked in a way that would rob most students of their will to live, let alone ask a question.

"Are you utilizing Tesla's Localized Apparition Field here?" Hermione asked, and only Harry noticed that asking questions did not come quite as naturally to her as on any other day. He was happy to see that she was not feeling bad enough to surrender her curiosity, though.

"Yes, if you _must_ know," Snape replied as if actually teaching something was physically hurting him. "You will only be able to apparate into the marked area, and not from any distance much larger than ours. So no Death Eaters will be joining us today, I'm afraid."

"No worries, Granger," Malfoy sneered. "Once we're done with the lesson I'm sure we'll all be able to apparate into your bed all right."

Roaring laughter erupted from the Slytherins, with Daphne Greengrass – to her questionable credit –probably looking the least comfortable. Harry, in what seemed to be a reflex, stroked Hermione's hand with his own, and when he noticed that she didn't flinch away from the touch, took her hand into his.

"I would be surprised if any of you were to be able to apparate at all without leaving your tiny heads behind," Snape remarked sullenly. He never seemed to like it much when anyone but himself was being a complete jerk. Frankly, he just didn't seem to like very much in general.

"Well," Harry couldn't help but say, "luckily for Malfoy he's the only one here for whom that wouldn't make much of a difference."

It was the Gryffindors' turn to laugh, and Ron gleefully added, "He would be a little nicer to look at, though," which made Seamus pretty much double up with laughter. Malfoy not so much.

"Order, _now_," Snape snarled menacingly. "I strongly advise you to listen carefully, for I guarantee you I will not be picking up your limbs if you imbeciles should manage to lose them."

For the next thirty minutes or so, Snape proceeded to introduce them to the expectably intricate workings of Apparition, including an admittedly impressive display of his own skills in the art when he easily apparated back and forth between the two areas in quick succession. The funny thing about Snape was that, when you just let him do what he liked best – showing off and hearing himself talk – he could actually be rather pleasant to be around and not the worst of teachers, in a _Do as I say or die_ kind of way.

Hermione did not ask any more questions throughout the lesson, although Harry felt her hand – which, as he didn't seem to consciously realize, he was still holding – twitch on more than one occasion. He threw her sideways glances from time to time, yet not once did she take her observant eyes off of Snape, listening intently to every word he spoke.

When it came to the practice-oriented part of the lesson, beginning with one or more Side-Along Apparitions with Snape for every student, not even Malfoy found the time to make his usual spiteful remarks anymore, for Slytherins and Gryffindors alike were too busy worrying about the risk of losing their limbs and concentrating too hard to avoid it to pay any mind to their juvenile rivalries.

At some point Seamus actually accomplished the rare feat of disapparating nothing _but_ his left pinkie somewhere into the designated area, where the Gryffindors then collectively went to look for it. On his way to the infirmary he had the severed finger plucked behind his ear, joking hilariously about it with his friend Dean, who escorted him on Snape's command. More successful could only be called those who didn't manage to disapparate at all.

When it was Hermione's turn to try on her own for the first time, Harry gave her hand a soft squeeze before she stepped forward into the area marked for Disapparition. Ignoring the sneers and snickers and a few obscene gestures coming from the group of Slytherins again, she closed her eyes and took one deep breath, which Harry involuntarily mirrored. Then, with the familiar sound of the softest of thunders she was gone; reappearing with barely perceivable latency in the Apparition area less than twenty yards away from them.

And as if that hadn't been enough, a mere two seconds later she apparated back to Professor Snape's side, who was utterly unable to hide his amazement, an expression hardly ever seen on his stern features. Hermione herself looked slightly disoriented and somewhat relieved for just a moment, before quickly regaining her composure.

"Well," she said, straightening out her skirt, "I believe I'm done here. If you'll excuse me, Professor Snape, my presence is required elsewhere."

And with that she marched off towards the castle, two dozen disbelieving pairs of eyes following her and more than a few mouths hanging stupidly agape. It took the Gryffindors just a second longer than usual to erupt into cheers, and even Snape needed a moment to recover before he was able to silence them.

At the end of the lesson, nearing one o'clock, no one but Hermione Granger had accomplished a perfectly executed Apparition, let alone two – much to the chagrin of Draco Malfoy and his fellow Slytherins.

~•~

After that unexpected highlight Harry was quick to realize that the day was not yet done, and far from it. When he returned to the castle after their Apparition lesson for lunch, the Great Hall was abuzz with secretive whispers, surreptitious glances and some more or less ambiguous, but unquestionably inappropriate gestures. By now, as it turned out, truly everyone knew – or at least their own version of it. It might have been merely due to Harry's paranoid state of mind, but at some point he could have sworn even Argus Filch was eying him more suspiciously than usual.

To Harry's great dismay, Hogwarts' nosey populace grew bolder as well and some began to shamelessly approach him right there at his table, asking him all kinds of dubious questions. Was it true? How had he done it? Could it be taught? Some especially disturbed specimen actually seemed willing to pay him money for what he could only describe as a shortcut to Azkaban. The first one to approach him was slightly annoying at worst, the second one managed to increase his irritation and the third and fourth one made him downright livid. Even Ron had enough at that point, angrily telling them to bugger off and warning them that they did not want to be caught standing between a Weasley and his lunch.

Finally, when a seething Harry was just on the brink of having an outburst after some bloke from Slytherin he had never even taken note of before asked him why _of all options_ he would choose _Granger's bed_, Professor Sinistra, who was overseeing lunch today – a responsibility that sounds much more important than it actually was on most days of any given term –, stood and spoke up, declaring that no one was to rise from their seat for any other reason than to leave the hall for the remainder of lunch break. After that, Harry, Ron and Hermione could at least finish their meal in relative peace, although all but one of them barely had any appetite to begin with.

Yes, Hermione sat next to Harry just as she always did, and they also shared all their remaining classes in the afternoon, but suffice it to say that their interaction was limited at best, and certainly strained under the disconcerting circumstances. All the looks they shared were timid in nature, all the moments they touched unintentionally were clumsy and lead to nervous smiles being exchanged, like when they both reached for an inkpot at the same time or when they shared a book during their Charms class and they both simultaneously tried to turn the page and instead ended up halfway intertwining their hands. Harry did not care to count all the times they said _Sorry_ to each other over the course of that single afternoon. Virtually everything seemed to be something to feel sorry about today, which was something Harry definitely felt silly rather than sorry about.

It was, basically, the exact opposite of how they usually behaved around each other, and it frustrated Harry more than anything else. He could take the ridiculous rumors and endless gossiping, the stupid questions and even the petty-minded insults, but having his friendship with Hermione compromised was completely unacceptable. Contributing immensely to his general unrest was the fact that maybe for the first time ever he had not the slightest idea what Hermione was thinking and feeling and the need and simultaneous inability to talk to her were threatening to drive him mad over the course of the progressing day. He hadn't even told her how sorry he was for the mess he had put her in. There just never seemed to be the time and opportunity. There was too much noise all around and they always seemed to be in a rush to get from class to class without being too exposed to the curious eyes and busy tongues in the hallways.

So instead he was left sitting quietly next to her in Charms, Magical Art and Ancient Runes, the last of which he even had to endure in the absence of Ron, who had never taken Ancient Runes since – sadly – he suffered from acute dyspnea whenever faced with any rune that was older than Professor Binns, as he liked to say. Magical Art, on the other hand, had become something of a personal favorite of Ron's, for there was just no other subject where he could get a grade of A or above for simply creating something that apparently resembled a rhinoceros. Professor Salvadore was really fond of those.

Harry, however, was unable to care much for either rhinoceros or anything else going on in their classes, really, and he was just relieved when it was finally all over for the day. Stepping out into the hallway after their last class of the day had ended, Harry was just about to say something to Hermione when she forestalled him.

"I'm off to my French class now," she told him, much to his puzzlement.

"You're taking French lessons? At Hogwarts?" Harry asked accordingly. "I thought no one here cared about any kind of education that is actually of any use in the greater part of the world."

"I'm not the student, I'm the teacher," she explained, nervously eying the people around them who would just not stop gawking at them. "Hagrid is trying to write a letter to his… French half-giant lady friend in her mother tongue, and I'm helping him with it."

"Oh," was what Harry had to say to that, disappointed that again there would be no chance to talk to her. Unless…

_Say something. Say something!_

"Well, uh…"

_Something else!_

"Bonne chance, as the French hopefully say?"

_You idiot!_

"Merci beaucoup!" she said, smiling faintly and barely looking him in the eye.

With that she swiftly turned and walked away from him, her steps quickening until she vanished from sight when she turned a corner, leaving Harry behind to lean back against the wall and silently curse himself some more. It was quickly becoming one of his favorite activities.

~•~

At the end of the day, late in the evening, Harry found himself sitting once more in his favorite armchair in front of the fireplace in the common room, staring bleakly into the calmly flickering fire. He hadn't seen Hermione again after she had gone off to Hagrid in the afternoon. Then again, he had hardly left Gryffindor tower himself, avoiding dinner in the Great Hall and instead opting for a more private and undisturbed meal up here in the common room. Ron had offered to stay with him, but Harry had asked him to go to the Great Hall instead in case Hermione would show up there. She did not, as Ron reported after his return. Maybe she had eaten at Hagrid's.

Harry had met Professor McGonagall on his way back to the tower at some point, and she had enquired about his wellbeing. Physically he felt perfectly fine, if a little bruised, and that's just what he had told her. She had smiled knowingly at him and advised him not to pay too much mind to the idle gossip going around the castle like a flu epidemic. When he had replied that it wasn't just that, she had smiled even more knowingly and said that she had no doubt things would all work out just fine with _Miss Granger_. Sometimes, in her own caring way, the old woman really creeped him out. Apart from Hermione, no one else had ever given him that indescribable feeling of having the book of your own self read by someone else while you yourself were still trying to figure out what language it was written in. Except maybe for Dumbledore, but he was literally capable of reading minds at his leisure and that was just plain unfair.

Then, of course, he had come to realize that he had not merely met the professor on a chance encounter, for she had also given him something. The thing that came in the shape of a rather ordinary looking wristband was apparently a magical device Professor Flitwick and Madame Pomfrey had come up with on short notice, and it was supposed to detect various bodily functions while he was sleeping and would also let Professor McGonagall know if he should abruptly change his whereabouts by means of Apparition. All in all, it seemed to be something Muggle governments would be really keen on, and though Harry didn't exactly like the idea of being monitored during his sleep – or any other state, for that matter – he saw the use of it under the circumstances.

"Have you ever wondered what gits like Malfoy think about?" Ron's voice pulled Harry out of his train of thoughts.

"I'm not so sure I would want to know," Harry answered doubtfully.

"Nah, I mean like, do they know they are puny little buggers?" Ron wondered, obviously in a very philosophical mood tonight. "Do they think of themselves as pricks? Are they like, '_Oh, it's so great to be a prick_,' or do they actually believe they are perfectly nice people? And, consequently, do they think of us as the actual arseholes? _Are_ we the actual arseholes? Is Malfoy a good person and are we the puny little buggers? Are we all seeing the world upside down? And what is wrong with this Butterbeer? It tastes weird."

Harry looked at his friend with both his eyebrows raised up to his hairline, which admittedly – disheveled as it was – was somewhere all over his forehead.

"I think it's long past your bedtime, Ron."

Ron looked at him with the funniest expression frozen on his features, his eyes narrowed to slits and his lips puckered to the extreme, and then he suddenly said, "Yah," and stood up in one quick motion. After a few steps he turned around again, saying, "Oh, and Harry?"

"Yes?"

"Be a good lad and wear your contraceptive bracelet."

Harry threw the next best pillow at him, which Ron caught in front of his chest and was just about to carelessly take with him, when suddenly the portrait hole swung open and Hermione entered, making Ron pause and turn. At first Harry was relieved to see her, but when she stepped into the light and he saw the condition she was in, his heart sank. She was about to hurry straight past him on her way to her dorm, but he bounded from his chair just in time to catch her.

"Hermione!" he exclaimed, grabbing her arm gently even in his swift motion. "What happened?"

She reluctantly turned around halfway and Harry was shocked to see the tears glistening wetly on her worn out face.

"It's nothing, Harry," she uncharacteristically denied the obvious, her voice near its breaking point. "I just want to go to bed now. Will you please let me go?"

For a moment he was stunned, unable to react. When her pleading, bloodshot eyes met his, his hand dropped to his side, and she left with a weak _'Thank you.'_

Frozen still Harry watched her go. He had never seen her looking so frail before, and the pain he felt as his eyes followed her was not his own, and yet more his own than any other he had ever felt. An awkward silence had taken the common room, but those few who were still left there had the decency to look anywhere but at Harry.

He couldn't have said how much time passed before the first sound to reach his ears through the beating of his own heart was Ron clearing his throat uncomfortably.

"You think there's any chance Hagrid's French is really, _really_ bad?"

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_Tesla's Localized Apparition Field:_ This is, of course, an allusion to the ingenious, incomparable and regrettably widely unknown Serbian inventor and visionary Nikola Tesla – the virtuoso of electricity. I believe I first heard of him when playing the computer game _Command & Conquer: Red Alert _back in the 1990s, in the form of weaponized Tesla coils; henceforth associating the name of Tesla with awesome crazy lightning stuff (which isn't even all that wrong).

I don't want to go into this in any detail within the confines of this footnote, but please look him up. Or at the very least, the next time someone tells you the answer to a question is 'Thomas Edison' say 'Nikola Tesla' instead and there's a good chance you'll actually be right. Except when the question is, "Who electrocuted an elephant just to make a point and get some publicity?"

So, this is just my own little tribute to a great and wrongfully forgotten man. I think it's nice to imagine that while largely underappreciated and exploited by lesser men in the Muggle world, he was also a magical inventor and, amongst other things, a master in the field of Apparition; and amongst wizarding folk he is widely respected and admired for his pioneering works and contributions to progress. He would've been very fond of the Owlery too, I should think. Next best thing to pigeons.

_Professor Salvadore:_ Pronounced more like '_-doray'_, rather than _'-dore'_ as in Dumbledore (just to give a more exotic ring to it, really). Now he's obviously an allusion to the inimitable Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who in my opinion would just be the perfect candidate to teach Art at a place like Hogwarts. I think he'd love that place. Also, with the rhinoceros, I was very much thinking of Adrien Brody's hilarious portrayal of Dalí in Woody Allen's charming film _Midnight in Paris_. If you don't know the movie, do yourself a favor and at least search for "midnight in paris rhinoceros" on YouTube and see Professor Salvadore… excuse me, Adrien Brody in action.


	4. Refuge

**Author's Note:** Next chapter.

That's it. That's all I got.

Seriously.

* * *

**• Chapter IV •**

**Refuge**

He had long lost count of how often he had switched from one side to the other and back again, and he had lost any track of time as well. He could tell from experience that knowing the amount of time you had unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep would make it even harder to do so more often than not; knowing how much time you would have left to sleep if only you would manage to finally _go_ to sleep right then, which rarely tended to work out that way. Instead, the earlier it got the faster morning seemed to approach, and when at some point the birds would begin to sing and the first light of day would fall through the windows, you realized the futility of it all and either get up on the spot or, ironically enough, finally fall asleep thinking that now it didn't matter, for you wouldn't be able to get enough sleep before you had to wake up again anyway.

Giving in to his restlessness, Harry reached for the alarm clock on his bedside table and grumpily whispered _'Lumen!'_ to make the clock-face light up in vibrantly glowing blue. To his surprise it wasn't even half past one yet, so he had wasted his time for just about two hours and – as it was impossible not to think – he'd still have more than five hours left to sleep if only…

With a groan of frustration he roughly put the clock down again, its light fading as soon as it left his hands, and turned to lie on his back with his hands loosely entwined under his head. This was not like any other sleepless night. Normally he would at least be sure that he actually wanted to fall asleep, but not even that was a given tonight, for after all he couldn't be sure where he would end up waking. He wondered what exactly it was that had happened to him – twice – and if there could possibly be a way to control it. And, of course, why stuff like this always seemed to be happening to him.

Feeling the bracelet on his right wrist he also couldn't help but wonder what exactly it was monitoring or detecting about him, and if it was doing anything right now or if it would really only work while he was sleeping, which would mean that it hadn't done anything yet – except maybe wondering when the hell its bloody wearer would finally fall asleep so it could get to work.

After a rather uneventful sixth year Harry had dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to finish school in a blissfully average kind of way, but there he was, barely into the third week of the term, and already teleporting into the beds of the female half of the pupils like some sleepwalking pervert with a wand. He couldn't remember reading anything about juvenile sexual predators in _Hogwarts: A History_, so he probably had a good chance of being mentioned therein as the first of his kind. His parents would be so proud.

Granted, this newfound predicament wasn't exactly in the same league as Basilisks, Dementors, ridiculously sadistic tournaments or the ongoing struggle against Voldemort and his cult following as far as potential mortality was concerned, but at least none of those were utterly and completely embarrassing in nature. Harry was used to deal with a lot of things, many of which were probably more than someone of his age should ever have to deal with, but this? This was just unfair. You could throw all the giant snakes, undead wraiths and power-crazed Dark Lords the world had to offer at him for all he cared, but throwing him into his best friend's bed was just plain mean.

He exhaled a long, deep breath through puffed up cheeks and thought of Hermione, hoping that she at least was able to find some rest. He hoped her tears had dried, and wondered what had caused them to fall in the first place. He wished he could have been there for her; protected her. Not that he thought of Hermione as someone in need of much protection. After all she knew more combat spells than any other current student of Hogwarts and was more adept at using them than most of them combined.

But there were things in life not even magic could protect you from, and more often than not those were the ones that hurt the most. Those were exactly the things he had such an inexplicably intense need to shield her from, as he somehow realized over and over again every time he saw her in any kind of pain. Few, if any things tugged as much at his heartstrings as Hermione's tears. It was an odd feeling.

And now she was suffering because of him, which was the worst of all possible versions of something that was, in its very essence, entirely bad to begin with. And all this stupid mess only because of a naughty dream he never had! Well, not never, as he suddenly recalled with an inconvenient succession of illicitly salacious images flashing past his mind's eye…

_Oh, oh. That's not good. Don't think about that now. Don't think of the shower and the steam and the drops of water on her smooth skin and that leer she gave you and her whisper in your ear… you are doing it right now, you moron! Stop it! That's' your best friend you're picturing naked there! Stop, you disgusting piece of—_

He shook himself, burying his face in his hands as if that would help keep his mind's eye shut. Where had _that_ come from, anyway? It was all Ron's fault, obviously, with all that nonsense about dirty dreams. He had been a perfectly decent guy before all that, he was sure. For the most part, anyway. But now? Now he was having wanton dreams about his best female friend! It didn't get any more indecent than that. Oh, if she knew about any of this she would never want to talk to him again, and rightfully so. It was a good thing then that he was also waking up in her bed at night to give his inappropriate dreams some much needed context.

An exasperated groan escaped his lips, muffled by his hands he still kept his face buried in.

_Oh, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have dirty dreams._

When Harry finally fell asleep not too long after that, he was already too tired to appreciate the irony of succumbing to the exhaustion of exactly that constant barrage of thoughts that had kept him awake the whole time.

~•~

In his dream he wasn't alone, and though the night was cold he was not. In his dream he held his eyes shut, but he didn't have to see to know that he was not alone, for he felt it. He felt it in another's skin, lightly brushing against his own. He felt it in the warmth they shared and in the slightest fluctuations in the air, where his own breath softly mingled with another's. He felt it all around him, engulfing him like an invisible blanket, and he felt it deep within: the complete and unquestionable certainty that he was not alone in any sense of the word.

The dream faded away and he slowly opened his eyes, and he found that the dream had never been. A pair of dark, chocolate eyes were meeting his, surrounded by lovely features warmly aglow. He blinked once or twice to banish the blurry veil of sleep from his eyes. So small a distance lay between their faces that, being myopic, he could make out the finer lines of her face quite clearly. There had never been a face he knew better, remembered more easily and vividly than the one before him now.

"Hey," she greeted him, speaking softly.

"Hey yourself," he replied, a little unsurely.

For one silent moment they merely looked into each other's eyes, seeking one another's thoughts and not even finding their own.

"You aren't screaming," he observed, half in bemusement and half in jest.

"You aren't bouncing," she replied calmly.

A coy smile crept over his lips. "I won't bounce if you won't scream."

"I won't scream," she just said.

Another moment of silence passed between them.

"So, are you getting used to my nightly visits already?" he asked, more outspokenly than he had intended.

"Maybe," she answered. "But I've been awake for a while, so I had time to adjust."

"Really? What have you been doing?"

For the first time during their exchange, she averted her eyes for a mere second and shifted a little under her blanket, then looked up above them and said, "This."

He followed her gesture and looked up as well, noticing a single, small flame hovering in the air above their heads, friskily flickering away.

"Isn't that against some rule?" he asked, returning his eyes to hers.

"It's the perfect situation, then," she remarked, giving him a telling look.

"Right, yeah. About that," he said, somewhat flustered and very aware of their _situation_ all of a sudden, "I should probably leave, right?"

_Why did I just make that a question?_

Hermione remained quiet, looking at him with an unreadable expression.

"I mean," Harry hastily went on, "McGonagall gave me this weird bracelet thingy here, that's supposed to monitor me in my sleep and should also have alerted her to my, uh, altered whereabouts by now."

"Oh," said Hermione. "Well, that's a good thing. But shouldn't she be here already?"

"She should, shouldn't she?" Harry concurred. "I mean, yesterday it was like I had barely finished my athletic routine and she was already there to judge me."

"And now she's not," she said very quietly.

"Now she's not," he echoed her.

He looked at her as if in search of something, and she looked right back.

"I guess I should… I should probably go," he said indecisively.

"Hm," made Hermione, which to Harry's great dismay could really have meant a whole lot of things, or nothing at all.

"Although… it might be risky, going out there," he said, scratching the back of his head. "I mean, Crookshanks is probably just lying in wait somewhere for a chance to make my life even more miserable. Again."

The shiest of smiles played around one corner of Hermione's lips as she said, "You don't have to go."

"I don't?" asked Harry, his relief too deep not to show at least a little. "Well, that's actually pretty convenient, since I was hoping to get a chance to finally talk to you."

"So you thought you'd just stop by in my bed for a chat?"

"Yeah, sure," he casually joined the jest, shrugging his shoulders as much as his horizontal position allowed. "I was in the area anyway, you know?"

"The area being the girls' dormitories?" Hermione dubiously asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Oh, stop it," said Harry in playful defiance. "It's not even half as funny as it sounds, and it doesn't even sound all that funny."

Despite it not being all that funny, they nevertheless shared a quiet ripple of laughter about it. It was a habit hard to shed to behave more quietly at night, even when behind enchanted curtains.

"So," Hermione began once they ended up looking at each other for a second too long again, "what did you want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, anything really," Harry replied. "I feel like we haven't talked in ages."

She gave him a quizzical look. "I believe I recall a rather pleasant exchange on Monday."

"Exactly," said he. "Ages."

She smiled in response and gently pinched his shoulder with her index finger.

"Seriously, though," he said, concern showing on his features. "How are you doing?"

"Right now I'm feeling quite alright," she answered sheepishly.

"Yeah, but I mean… in general. Like earlier in the common room."

She was running her fingers over the bed sheet, drawing random invisible lines and shapes on the fabric.

"It was silly, really," she said evasively.

He watched her intently. "It didn't look silly when you wept."

"Silly tears," she insisted stubbornly and Harry couldn't help but smile in spite of himself.

He resisted the urge to say something else and instead chose to quietly, patiently wait for her at that point. Eventually she spoke.

"After I left Hagrid's place I went to the library to do some studying, which truth be told ended up as reading Wuthering Heights," she began to explain, and to Harry's amusement looked positively ashamed at that. "I just wanted to relax a little, I guess. It hadn't exactly been the best day up to that point, as you can imagine. So, nerdy bookworm that I am, I sought refuge in my usual corner in the library. And for a while it was nice enough, taking my mind off of all the things that were going on yesterday.

"But," she said with a sigh, clearly uncomfortable with herself, "eventually I became aware of a… conversation, taking place in the aisle behind me. Multiple voices, hard to discern. A few seemed familiar."

Harry didn't like where this was going, but he could see she wasn't done yet, so he remained silent.

"They talked about… well, what everybody seemed to be so eager to talk about yesterday. Some pretty disturbing, even mean and insulting things had come to my ear over the course of the day, some of which could hardly be put into any kind of justified context, but… nothing like that. The things those people said about… about you and… me, mostly me, were just… utterly vile and repulsive. I feel really silly for it, but it was just too much at that point.

"Under different circumstances I might even have been able to ignore it, you know? Because who cares what Pansy Parkinson and her daft fellowship think? There isn't exactly a lot of data to analyze there, anyway. But with everything that was going on it just… it got to me. I couldn't help it. It hurt. It made me angry. Really, really angry. They were defiling what is most precious to me in the most obscene, crudest way possible. And I really despised them for it."

She fell silent for a moment, the echo of her words reverberating in Harry's heart.

"I just had to get out of there," she then said, her voice strained. "So I did. Straight back to our common room, seeking the last refuge that was left to me, where I could just close the curtains and shut the world out for a while. Apart from those people who insist on teleporting right into my refuge, of course."

Harry gave her a sheepish smile. "Sorry about that," he meekly said, and he was glad to see her smile in return.

"It's okay," she assured him warmly, then took a deep breath to gather herself. "Well, to sum it all up, I told you it was silly."

Harry sighed and gave her a telling look. "It's not, and you know it," he said emphatically. "If I had been there I would have felt the same, I'm sure. Only my temper would probably have gone through the roof."

"Mr. Filch has a hard enough time keeping up with all the holes in the roof your temper has left all over the castle as it is," Hermione quipped. "So it's a good thing you weren't there."

The smile that flashed over his lips was quickly gone.

"I would've wanted to, though," he said in dead earnest.

"I know," she whispered.

She continued to move her fingers over the soft sheets, following the motion with pensive eyes.

"It's a curious thing, isn't it?" she seemingly mused aloud. "When we were sitting in those boats on the day of our arrival, floating on the dark, calm water of the lake and looking up at the castle with the night sky above alit with a billion stars, eyes round with childish wonder, I felt like I was stepping into a fairy tale come true. I felt like Alice and like Dorothy, swept up by an unexpected storm and thrown right into the Rabbit Hole.

"And somehow I was naïve enough to believe that everything would be perfect from there on; that people would suddenly be different. I couldn't imagine that any child lucky enough to possess magical talents could be cruel in any way. Except maybe for Slytherins. I actually remember thinking how nice a school it was to have a house specifically made for the rude and vicious. But other than that I thought I would finally find friends outside of my books and poetry. People who would like me just as much as I liked them.

"Having to learn that literally everywhere where there are people there are ignorance and intolerance, spite and malice, was the most disappointing lesson I ever received. It doesn't matter if they run around in robes or jeans, carry Game Boys or wands; as long as they have tongues to speak with they are going to hurt you, and you are going to hurt them back. Within a matter of days I felt as much out of place as I had in primary school, barely able to take solace in the ridiculous excitement of learning actual magic."

As he felt his heart going out to her, Harry had a hard time keeping his vision from blurring up and, childish as it made him feel at the same time, he hoped Hermione didn't notice. If she did, she didn't let it show.

"Have I ever told you about the letter?" she asked, and when Harry curiously furled his eyebrows went on to say, "I wrote my parents a letter after about four or five weeks, asking them to take me out of Hogwarts and bring me back home, maybe get me one of those private teachers I had heard about once."

She smiled sadly, remembering her younger self writing that letter, fiercely crying tears of hurt and disappointment all throughout.

"I never sent it," she revealed, the sadness vanishing from her lopsided smile, which instead went forth to slowly conquer the opposite corner of her lips as well. "Because I didn't want to give up what still seemed to me like the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Because I didn't want to give others so much power over me and my life. But most of all because Halloween happened a few weeks later."

She gave him the warmest smile, her eyes glinting with joy, and he smiled likewise back at her.

"When I received my invitation to Hogwarts, my life changed merely on the outside," she told him. "Only when you and Ron saved me from the mountain troll that night did my life change on the inside. And I guess I'm telling you all of this because I want you to know that I haven't felt alone since then. In a way it doesn't even matter if you are physically there or not, because I know that you are… just there, you know? That you'll always be there. Both of you, really. I have ridiculous amounts of confidence about that, which isn't exactly typical for me. And, uh, just for the record, I do prefer it if you are actually, physically around as well. Somewhere. In a… in a general sense, I mean…"

She cleared her throat and averted her eyes, looking just a little flustered about where her words had unexpectedly taken her.

"I feel the same," said Harry, his voice imbued with sincerity.

She sheepishly looked back up at him. "You do? Well, that's… that's good. I'm going to be less embarrassed about it, then."

"You do that," he said amusedly.

For a while they didn't speak at all. She continued to draw shapeless pictures with her fingers on the sheets, and Harry joined her; their fingers never touching, yet never far away from it.

"Aren't you cold?" Hermione eventually broke the silence.

Then, and only then, did Harry suddenly realize that not only was he lying in Hermione's bed, but that also no more than his usual pair of boxers were what stood between him and being completely starkers. In Hermione's bed. With both of them being very awake for a change.

"Nah," he answered as casually as he could, and not solely due to the sudden rise in his body temperature did he not lie. "I'm fine. I'm still expecting the whole bed to burn down eventually, anyway."

"Right," said Hermione, glancing up at her floating candle light that lacked the actual candle. "If I didn't know any better I would have to suspect that you don't have complete faith in my magical abilities."

"Now that couldn't be further from the truth," Harry insisted emphatically. "It's more physics I'm worried about right now."

She perked up both her eyebrows at him in incredulity.

"You have a cloak that makes you invisible, you fly around on a broomstick and you teleport around while sleeping, but now that you have a tiny, floating flame above your head you start worrying about physics?"

Harry made a face at her, pretending to be affronted. "Whatever."

Then, after a few seconds of their smiles slowly fading into calm expressions of contentment, Harry gave off a deep sigh.

"I'm sorry, you know?" he said to her.

Her eyes caringly wandered over his saddened features.

"Don't you think we've been sorry enough today for a long time to come?" she asked him sympathetically. "I believe at one point you even apologized for dropping your _own_ piece of parchment."

Harry had to chuckle, remembering the scene most vividly. "Yeah, during Charms. I was actually making an annoyed face at myself while leaning down to pick it up."

She quietly echoed his chuckle, while her finger seemed to be trapped in a continuing, half-circling motion around Harry's finger tip that he kept still.

"I mean it, though," he said, serious again. "Not about the parchments and accidentally touching your hand when trying to turn a page or brutally scarring stuff like that, but… about getting you into this whole mess. I seem to have a real knack for it, and I'm really sorry about that."

Her finger stopped, lightly brushing against his. She looked at him with deepest understanding, and maybe something else that was not quite yet in Harry's reach to grasp.

"I know," she whispered. "But there is nothing to be sorry about. You weren't the one who hurt me. You rarely are, and you always seem to know. We're in this together, you and me. Eventually the whole thing will blow over, they'll find something else to gossip about and we'll remain who we are. Well, actually they'll always come back to talking about you, because let's face it, you're Harry Potter. But at least I'll be off the hook."

He frowned at her and tapped his fingers on the sheet as she giggled away, pulling her pillow up to cover her mouth.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, shaking his head even while the widest smile broke his playful frown. "You enjoy your little moment there, missy. But at some point you'll have to face the fact that you're never off the hook, because where they talk about Harry Potter, they'll also have to talk about Hermione Granger, 'cause she's never too far off."

"Oh?" she said, feigning surprise. "Is that so?"

"Well," Harry began in a very important, businesslike manner, "multiple reliable sources that prefer to remain anonymous are in agreement, stating that… she apparently digs the bloke."

She laughed. "And who might those anonymous sources be, I wonder."

"Well," said Harry, taking his time to think about that very thoroughly, then meekly said, "Me?"

She practically beamed at him, and blushing ever so slightly said, "Your sources might be on to something there."

They shared a light-hearted laugh that ended with both of them yawning, and then laughing some more about their synchronized yawning.

"Merlin, McGonagall is really overdue, isn't she?" Harry asked, only now remembering about his bracelet and all that. "What time is it?"

Hermione lazily grabbed her wand from somewhere behind her pillow, flicked it over her head once and made a wispy, bodiless clock face appear above their heads that seemed to be made of gently swirling, bluely glowing smoke. Digital, no less.

It read 03:17.

"Huh", said Harry, a bit puzzled. "I'm beginning to doubt anyone's going to show up at all. And I'm also beginning to doubt this."

He raised his right arm and they both looked at the unremarkable bracelet wrapped tightly around his wrist.

"You want to clumsily stumble over the threshold and then move backwards while you are still halfway in the dorm room, so that you get flung against the wall again?" Hermione asked him flippantly. "You'd be sure to get Professor McGonagall's attention then, I reckon."

"Uh-huh," made Harry, putting his arm back down again. "No thanks. I'm fine right here."

"I see," she said, unable or unwilling to ignore the wider connotations of his statement. "You're probably too tired for the long and arduous journey back to your own bed as well."

"Definitely," Harry agreed enthusiastically, yawing again for good measure.

Their eyes locked once more; shyly and yet unabashedly, unmasked and yet still veiled.

"Do you maybe want to get some sleep?" Hermione asked tentatively.

Harry looked around, nodding slowly. "Sleep sounds nice."

She gave him a smile, looking rather tired herself by now. "You think you're going to wake up back in your bed?"

He thought about that for a moment. "I don't know. We'll just have to see about that, won't we? That way we'll at least have something new to tell McGonagall."

"Right," Hermione agreed, her eyes falling shut from time to time. "It's all in the name of science."

"Exactly," he concurred, letting his own eyelids fall and yet always fighting them up again to catch one last glimpse of Hermione.

"Lemme just…" she whispered weakly, grabbing her wand again. Harry was barely able to keep his eyes open to witness the laziest, most uncoordinated wand motion he had ever seen Hermione conduct, as she downright randomly wiped it through the air once and then let it slide from her hand when she plopped her arm back down onto the sheets in one fluent, awkward arch.

He was impressed to see that even this most pitiful of efforts was enough to achieve the desired results, for both flame and clock quickly faded into the air after that, as if blown away by some soundless gush of wind. With his eyes unadjusted to the sudden dark, it seemed nearly pitch black around him.

"Harry?" he heard Hermione ask with the softest voice.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever woken up anywhere else after that thing happened? Besides here, I mean."

For some reason the question made him smile. "No," he answered quietly.

"Huh," she breathed, somewhere near the edge of sleep by now. "That's interesting."

"It sure is," Harry agreed, no less exhausted.

No more was spoken after that, and as they slowly slipped away to sleep, their hands – at first lying a few inches apart from one another – slowly but surely, bit by bit, closed the distance between them until they finally, tenderly entwined in the very moment both Harry and Hermione were awake no more.

~•~

When Harry awoke on the following morning, which, of course, was barely four hours later, he needed a moment to get his bearings, because something was really off. That he seemed to have his arms wrapped around something wasn't even the strangest of things. Far more peculiar than that was the fact that whatever he had his arms wrapped around, that very something also seemed to have its arms wrapped around him; and maybe even a leg or two. Neither pillow nor blanket, nor any combination thereof, had ever made him feel either this hopelessly tangled up, or – as he was bemused to discover – comfortable. He certainly had never felt a pillow's breath against his chest. Not even at Hogwarts, where they had pillows that huffed and puffed whenever you hugged them too tightly, was that a common phenomenon.

Oh, and that scent! The smell that so endearingly filled his nose with every breath he took was more soothing and appealing than any smell he had ever woken up to. With his eyes still closed and the most satisfied grin on his face he inclined his head ever so slightly to bury his nose in what was evidently the soft, wavy source of that blissful smell. He took one very deliberate, long and deep breath to really take in the whole spectrum of the fragrance and—

"Harry?" he heard a slightly muffled and unquestionably female voice ask him, and it seemed to be talking to his chest. "Are you awake?"

His eyes flew wide open as his consciousness finally switched to full awareness. Although no one was there to see it, Harry had an expression on his face like a kid that was just caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Oh, what he would have given to actually switch places with that kid right now, confusing as the resulting scenes might have been.

"Would you believe me if I were to say no?" he asked, poised in utter petrifaction.

Silence.

"I could try," Hermione answered, sounding quite unsure. The way she said that would probably have made Harry laugh in any other situation, but given their rather precarious entanglement he wasn't exactly in the mood just yet.

With a careful peek downwards he realized that while his left arm apparently served as a pillow for Hermione, his right hand had inexplicably come to rest on her hip. Her hip, not the blanket _on_ her hip, because that had somehow ended up a little farther below. With her night gown not exactly being in its most orderly appearance either, his hand lay pretty much on nothing but her bare skin. Of her hip. He had a hard time forcing his eyes away from the curvature that followed just behind what is usually referred to as a hip as well.

Fearing an imminent attack of sweating, Harry cleared his throat. "So, uh, what would you say if we were to agree that we are both equally embarrassed by this, so that consequently neither of us would have to feel embarrassed at all?"

Again silence, in what seemed to be a moment of contemplation for everybody involved.

"Deal," came her answer.

For another awkward moment both of them remained unmoving. In a downright ridiculous notion Harry's right hand felt so heavy to him that he was sure for a second Hermione would have to be hurting under his touch. He was trying so hard not to move that hand so as not to draw any unnecessary attention to it that he could feel it shaking.

"So," he said, trying his best to sound nonchalant. "I guess I'll be heading off, then."

"Listen, Harry," Hermione said.

"Yes?"

"No, _listen_."

Harry needed a second to take her meaning, then raised his head ever so slightly and listened intently. Sure enough, there were busy shuffling sounds, footsteps and even a sporadic voice or two.

"Damn," Harry breathed.

"Exactly," Hermione agreed.

He sighed. They should have seen this coming. Then again, who could have seen any of this coming?

"Say, those things you said last night, about people talking about us and all the rumors and stuff, and more to the point, us not having to care about any of that, because we're better than that – did you mean it? Do you stand by it?"

Without even thinking Hermione answered, "Of course."

"Let them talk?"

"Let them talk."

"Then how about we give them something more to talk about?" he asked her.

She shifted slightly, leaning back a little to look up at him. He tried very hard to ignore the utterly undeniable fact that she looked absolutely endearing when woken up next to.

"Like what?" she asked, minor apprehension in the tone of her voice.

He smiled a surprisingly mischievous, lopsided smile.

"Get ready to see the next James Bond in action," he said with a daring glint in his eyes.

And before she could even begin to make sense of that statement, he had already disentangled himself from her and rolled over to his other side. When he was just about to draw aside the curtains, he turned around once more, and giving her a quick peck on the cheek said, "See you later," and only then went on to jump out of bed, with Hermione quickly leaning over to peek out through the curtains behind him.

Standing on his feet Harry was instantly aware of the abruptly changed atmosphere in the room. Mainly how time seemed to have stopped all around him. Parvati Patil stood nearly right in front of him with her pants halfway up to where they were supposed to go, looking at him with a horrified expression frozen on her features. Further away, near an opened wardrobe, stood Lavender Brown and Fay Dunbar. The former was frozen with her arms in mid-air, a shirt dangling loosely between them; the latter was at least fully clothed, bar one sock, but certainly no less petrified.

Harry inclined his head in a courteous gesture, merely missing the hat to complete the picture.

"Ladies," he said, and with that crossed the room most jauntily and left through the door, very careful to do so in one fluent motion.

Three flabbergasted pairs of eyes, round as circles, turned to stare at Hermione, who seemed flustered by the sudden attention for no more than a second and quickly put on an expression of someone who by appearances couldn't possibly care less.

"_Pfff_," she snorted, languidly rolling her eyes. "He's such a poser sometimes."

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_King of infinite space:_ That's Shakespeare's one and only _Hamlet_; Act II, Scene 2. Note that the Prince of Denmark, of course, has bad dreams – not dirty dreams. There's quite a lot of raunchy humor in Shakespeare's works, but it's usually a little more subtle than that. Sometimes.

Not when it's, "Come woo me, woo me, for I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent."

Saucy.

_Alice and Dorothy:_ Here Hermione is referring to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's _Alice in Wonderland_ (better known under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll) and Dorothy from Lyman Frank Baum's _Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ (or the equally or even more popular 1902 Broadway musical and Victor Fleming's 1939 film adaptation).

_Books and poetry:_ When Hermione talks about having friends outside her books and poetry, she's alluding to the song_ I am a Rock_ by Simon & Garfunkel.


	5. Insights

**Author's Note:** Somebody called me out on mistakes I had not yet noticed! Surviving the initial panic attack, it's safe to say that I immediately set out to find those little scoundrels to save myself from further embarrassment. I hope I got them all and can start breathing again. Thanks for assisting me on my journey to OCD perfection!

The very same person also asked about the setting. You're really out to put me to work here, anonymous Alice, aren't you? No hard feelings, though. Just some OCD. No worries.

Well, I do think the story as a whole works quite alright in and of itself, with enough information thrown in here and there to figure out the essential where, what and when without going into irrelevant details. But in case that doesn't suffice (and it's perfectly fine if it doesn't – maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I just didn't want to spell it all out), here's a quick outline:

The story takes place in 1997 and a non-canonical seventh year, completely ignoring books six and seven but largely taking the first five books into more or less important account, at least as far as their primary storylines are concerned; not so much in regard to some specific interpersonal interactions (more on that will follow in upcoming chapters). So, yes, mighty Lord Voldemort is indeed still skulking about somewhere, doing his thing and trying to come up with the ultimate fail-safe plan to kill a pubescent teenager.

Sixth year is meant to have been largely uneventful, as has been mentioned. In this crazy incarnation of Harry Potter's world, an attempt at his life has not been made every single year of school. Dumbledore is alive and well and Snape is just being Snape without all the duplicity. I mean, he might of course be doing his undercover stuff, but it's just not important to this particular story.

So, uh, yeah. Two pretty average years of school for Harry. Except for the involuntary tour through the girl's dormitories, of course.

And concerning that weird Siren story thingy… I have absolutely no idea what that is. I do know the mythological creature – if not personally – but I don't have the slightest conception of how or why anyone in my story would be a Siren. Hermione doesn't sit lasciviously in her bed, sings no beguiling songs and – not to spoil anything – is _probably_ not out to kill Harry, you know? It couldn't possibly be meant in such a literal way, could it?

Last, but most certainly not least: thanks to all readers for your ongoing attendance and for all reviews. The more enthusiastic ones are always the stuff that can make a day, but I appreciate them all. Being even remotely compared to anything Douglas Adams did is humbling beyond words, and making some of you giggle uncontrollably or go semi-crazy with joy is worth all the money in the world. Wait, how much money is there, exactly… ?

* * *

**• Chapter V •**

**Insights**

Somehow, everything Hermione did that morning took her at least twice as long as usual. She even brushed her teeth for what must have been more than eight minutes; so utterly lost in thought that she needed three minutes alone to realize there was no more tooth paste left in her mouth, in part due to the fact that she had been smiling most stupidly for the greater part of the time. And that was nothing compared to what her hair did to her, for it didn't seem to be at all willing to do what she wanted it to do, whatever that was. Hermione had certainly never thought of herself as someone who cared too much about her looks – if she'd had her own chapter in _Hogwarts: A History_ it would surely have listed the three times in her seven years at school she needed more than five minutes to get dressed – but desiring to look orderly at the very least was certainly something she found reasonable enough.

In the end, after minutes of reworking and discarding it over and over again with rapidly increasing frustration, she did what any sensible woman would do in her situation and settled for a ponytail, mitigating the disaster that was her hair simply, yet effectively. For the first time in ages she faced her reflection in the mirror with more than her daily dose of disillusionment. Today she was no less than disgusted with herself.

_He wouldn't even call me disgusting if it were the only adjective in the English language… yeah, well, he obviously didn't see these giant bags under my eyes, or my ridiculously splotchy skin that makes me look like I have the chickenpox, or how my pores look like craters left by the impact of a hundred asteroids. Wait, are my eyes of different sizes? Over 90% of the world's human population has brown eyes. Makes me feel all kinds of special. Gosh, have they always looked this bland? And what's wrong with my lips? They are virtually all over the place. Merlin's beard, I'm a mutant!_

"Hey, you," Harry greeted her cheerfully when she morosely sat down next to him in her usual place in the Transfiguration class room. "You look nice."

"Yeah, right," she gruffly dismissed his compliment, angrily getting her books out of her school bag and practically throwing them onto the table without so much as looking at him.

"Thanks," she heard him say good-naturedly. "I spent extra time on my hair just to hear that."

She sighed, smiling despite herself. Turning to face him she raised an eyebrow with a look at his perpetually untidy hair. "No you didn't."

"I did, actually," he insisted. "It just ended up making no difference whatsoever."

Her smile spread, lighting up her eyes. "I like it just the way it is."

"Well, that's really all that… uh, that uh, that uh… uh—"

"Morning, guys," Ron played the deus ex machina for Harry. "I brought you some breakfast. Where the hell were you?"

True to his word Ron threw them a small bag, which Harry easily caught in mid-air with the sure hands of a seasoned Quidditch player. Then he dropped it and said, "Oops."

Ron proceeded to seat himself at the table on the other side of the small aisle between them. The class room was only now beginning to fill with students, for Harry and Hermione had been the first to arrive after skipping breakfast independently of each other and coming straight here for their first class of the day.

"We overslept a little, is all," Hermione diffidently answered Ron's question.

"Both of you?" he asked, an eyebrow raised skeptically.

Hermione's cheeks turned pink, while Harry seemed to be suspiciously busy with the bag Ron had thrown him, retrieving a croissant from it and handing it to Hermione, who took it with a grateful smile.

"Oh, I see," said Ron knowingly, watching the exchange with a great deal of attention and no lesser deal of amusement.

Before he could make the moment any more awkward for Harry and Hermione and, consequently, relish it even more, the appearance of Professor McGonagall took their collective attention. With some students still missing and a few minutes left until the official start of the lesson, the professor approached them after taking note of their presence.

"Miss Granger, Mr. Potter," she greeted them, a latent hint of suspicion in her voice. "Your absence during breakfast was far too conspicuous to miss. To everyone in the Great Hall, I dare say. May I inquire as to why exactly the both of you weren't present? A slight deprivation of sleep, perhaps?"

The two in question shared a guilty look.

"Well," Harry began, then cleared his throat and put on his most winning smile before continuing. "We've got great news, professor. We have collected compelling evidence suggesting that this," he said, raising his right arm and pointing to the bracelet with his left index finger, "does not work."

Ron snorted with laughter while Hermione put a palm to her forehead. Professor McGonagall gave Harry a sullen look, although the way she pressed her lips together might just have given room to the interpretation that she was indeed suppressing a smile of her own.

"We will talk about this later," she indicated unequivocally. "And while something evidently has gone wrong, I'm optimistic that the bracelet will at least have gathered the data we hoped for, Mr. Potter. It should make for one interesting analysis, I'm sure."

The professor turned and walked back to her desk, while Harry lowered his arms again and tried to fight the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat.

The theory-heavy lesson itself went by uneventfully, until at some point Professor McGonagall asked a question to which nobody seemed to know the answer, which usually did not happen in a class attended by Hermione Granger.

"Miss Granger?" the professor asked accordingly, openly perplexed. "Surely you can tell us the answer."

Hermione didn't react for another second or two, staring into some far off distance with a vacant expression on her face.

"Hmmm?" she dreamily sighed as if the sound of her name was reaching her only now. Then she cringed all of a sudden and looked around, dazed and confused. "I'm sorry, what?"

"The question," McGonagall said, clearly not much less bewildered than her preoccupied student.

"Oh," said Hermione, her cheeks heating up quickly and turning a bright pink. "I'm sorry," she repeated, unable to make sense of this most unfamiliar situation. "I… I wasn't… listening."

The silence that followed had a deafening quality about it, as it so often happens when people are present while history is being written. Hermione Jane Granger had just dozed off during a class and missed a question. Then, of course, a snicker went through the class room, which does not so often happen while history is being written.

"Huh," made Professor McGonagall. "Well, I guess… we'll just proceed, then. What was my question again?"

Not even then a lot of hands were raised, but at least a few.

When the class was dismissed half an hour later, the professor called Harry and Hermione to her. When the other students had left the room and their animated whispers with them, McGonagall looked at them over the rim of her glasses with her hands folded on the desk in front of her.

"So," she said, then paused for a moment. "Is there anything you would like to tell me?"

Hermione threw Harry a sideways glance, but he seemed to be very interested in his shoes at the moment.

"Yeah, well," he told them reluctantly, "I guess you already know it happened again."

"I see," said McGonagall. "Same variables?"

"Variables?" asked Harry, taking his eyes off his shoes and looking up at the professor instead.

"State of consciousness, Mr. Potter," she replied somewhat impatiently. "Location, people involved, time of day and such."

"Oh, right," said he, a little embarrassed. "Well, those are all pretty invariable for the most part. The time wasn't exactly the same, but it again happened at night while I was sleeping."

"Very well," the professor assessed, "we will get into more detail later today, when we'll be expecting you in the infirmary at four o'clock in the afternoon. The both of you."

"The infirmary?" Hermione asked worriedly. "You don't believe Harry's health is at risk, do you?"

"The possibility cannot be ruled out at the moment, with the lack of information or even experience we have with this," McGonagall calmly explained, "but there is no severe cause for concern either, or else I would have taken more drastic measures sooner. Finding out what exactly is happening to Mr. Potter is precisely what we are trying to do, and to that end the infirmary seems to be the place best suited."

Hermione nodded, no more than partially reassured, and the professor turned her attention to Harry.

"Would you please hand me the bracelet? Madam Pomfrey will conduct a preliminary reading of whatever information it has gathered. Only if you don't intend to sleep again before four o'clock, that is."

"Well," said Harry, "we do have History of Magic today, but I'll try very hard to stay awake. Hermione sits right next to me, so I'd probably stay in one place anyway."

With some reluctance and, as Hermione had no doubt, no small amount of anxiety as to what exactly Madam Pomfrey would be getting to _read_ there, Harry stripped the elastic bracelet off his wrist and handed it over to Professor McGonagall.

For once she smiled at them, and rather warmly so – encouragingly even.

"I'll be seeing you at four, then."

For some reason no one else felt like smiling.

~•~

Four o'clock seemed to arrive just a tad faster today than it was usually the case, even with History of Magic being their last class of the day. But not even Professor Binns' normally reliable ability to illustrate the relativistic phenomenon of time dilation, by making time pass much slower for everyone within his classroom than it did for those outside of it, seemed to work today. So when the ghostly professor dismissed them at a quarter to four after his usual, mostly uninterrupted lecture, both Harry and Hermione were left feeling cheated. There was now officially nothing left standing between them and their _appointment_, and the whole awkward nature of their situation made itself known in full force again. In moments like that it's always invaluable to have a person like Ron in your life, with a real knack for making situations less embarrassing than they necessarily have to be.

"So, you think it's a boy or a girl?" he asked them gleefully while they stepped out of classroom 4F and into the hallway. "Have you talked names yet? Just promise me not to call him Bilius if it's a boy. He would always resent you for it, trust me."

When he turned around to face them he found both of them glaring at him with clenched jaws and flushed cheeks, which naturally only served to widen the grin on Ron's face.

"Damn, you're such easy targets," he told them blithely.

"Cut it out, Ronald _Bilius_ Weasley!" Hermione retorted, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

"Oh, that's a cheap shot," said Ron, feigning hurt. "You take that right back, Hermione _Jane_ Granger!"

With her chin proudly raised, she merely shrugged her shoulders. "I like my middle name."

"And so do I," added Harry, crossing his arms likewise. "Tough luck, _Bilius_."

"You guys are so droll," Ron remarked, shaking his head at them. "Have you ever noticed how both your first _and_ your middle names have a really nice ring to them together?"

The two of them shared an awkward look.

"Harry and Hermione, James and Jane," Ron said in a sing-song voice, dreamily turning his gaze into a far off distance. Then, with a dramatic flourish, he added in the same musical voice, "It gets even stranger, even Potter and Granger!"

He turned to look at them and found their faces were now a bright red on the verge of glowing.

"Aren't your initials just made to be printed on Christmas cards and wedding invitations and on the letter box of your house? Seriously, it's like somebody made it all up," he said, at least not singing anymore, but far too smug for either Harry's or Hermione's taste.

"Honestly, Ron. You're such a… you're so… like, totally…" an irritated Hermione stammered, then broke off, looked thoughtful for a moment and finally stared at them with her arms akimbo. "Does anyone else feel like we're eight years old right now?"

"Pretty much, yeah," agreed Harry, nodding away.

Ron looked grumpy. "You're right," he relented with some disappointment. "Damn, I really had something going there. Where did I go wrong?"

"Let me think," Hermione slowly said, pensively tapping her chin with her index finger. "Probably somewhere around the time you started talking."

"Funny," Ron deadpanned.

Harry glanced at his watch and sighed despondently. "I guess we should get going."

"Cheer up, mate," Ron told him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. "I can't believe this could be anything serious."

Harry didn't appear to be all that convinced by his friend's unwavering optimism.

"Come on," said Ron encouragingly. "I mean, really, what interest could You-Know-Who possibly have in getting you laid?"

Both Harry and Hermione looked at him with a scowl frozen on their features. Then they blinked once and went straight past him without another word.

"What?" Ron asked inculpably. "I didn't mean it like _that_."

They kept going their way and Ron desperately threw his arms in the air, yelling after them, "Come on, guys. Guys?"

They didn't react to that either, and shortly after that cut a corner and were gone from his sight.

"It was _kinda_ funny," Ron stubbornly muttered to no one but himself in the absence of any alternatives.

~•~

When they finally arrived at the entrance to the infirmary just about five minutes later, Harry and Hermione came to a mutual halt in front of the two-winged door. For a moment neither of them either talked or looked at the other, but then their heads turned and their eyes met. She gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile, although it felt awfully unsteady on her lips.

"It'll be fine, I'm sure," she said, trying to convince herself of the truth in her words just as much as him. "They'll have identified the problem and found a solution, and everything will go back to the way it was. Simple."

"Right," said Harry, averting his eyes. "And that's good. I mean, obviously."

"Obviously," Hermione echoed him softly, likewise looking at the door which doubtlessly could be called interesting from a certain point of view, in a dull kind of way.

"And it won't be embarrassing at all either," Harry added. "Because why would it?"

"Right," Hermione reaffirmed him naturally. "I can't even think of a single, even remotely embarrassing thing that could have anything to do with any of this. Whatever happened to you the last few days is surely something entirely normal and… respectable, and above all easily fixed."

"Definitely," he agreed.

A few seconds passed in silence, until it was officially four o'clock.

"So," said Harry, taking a deep breath. "You ready?"

"Ready when you are."

"I don't feel ready at all."

"Me neither."

"Great, let's do this."

They each pushed one wing of the door open and crossed the ante room with a few determined strides. Their short-lived determination took a harsh blow when they saw the congregation of individuals awaiting them in Madam Pomfrey's office. Not only the matron herself and, as both Harry and Hermione had expected, Professor McGonagall were present, but also the Professors Flitwick and – to Harry's great dismay – Snape, as well as no other than Dobby; to both Harry's and Hermione's great puzzlement.

It was Snape who noticed them first. "Ah, Hogwarts' most precious ménage à deux bestows upon us the honor of their noble presence," he announced their arrival to his colleagues in mock solemnity; his demeanor half amused, half bored – all disgusted.

"Now, now, Severus!" a good-humored Professor Flitwick said, turning around with the others to face the new arrivals. "There's no reason to be scornful. This is all so very interesting!"

"Oh, yes," Snape replied sarcastically. "Dissecting Potter's psychosexual development surely is one of the highlights of my academic career."

"Could we please keep this civil and serious?" Professor McGonagall interposed, though the tone of her voice made it more of a command than a request. She then turned her attention to Harry and Hermione to address them personally. With a smile she said, "I can tell you are somewhat overwhelmed by our little gathering here, so let me explain why each of us is present.

"Professor Flitwick, as you know, was already involved in the magic for the bracelet we used to monitor your bodily and magical functions during your sleep. Together with Professor Dumbledore himself he's also responsible for the establishment as well as the maintenance of Hogwarts' magical security measures. Professor Snape is here since his aptitude in Apparition is second not even to that of our highly esteemed Headmaster."

"Please, Minerva. You're exaggerating," Snape interjected, and for once seemed abnormally honest in his humility.

"No, I'm not, Severus," replied McGonagall. "Your modesty, refreshing as it may be, is misplaced. Be that as it may," she continued, turning back to Harry and Hermione again, "your friend Dobby," and the house-elf happily took a bow at his introduction, "is here because house-elves possess a very unique ability for Apparition that is most importantly immune to any kind of counter-magic. Poppy's presence as well as my own should be self-explanatory, I believe. And thus we are all gathered here."

"Well, that actually makes a lot of sense," said Hermione rather delightfully. "It's quite intriguing, to be frank."

Harry threw her a bewildered look, at which she looked abashed.

"Sorry, but it is," she meekly said. "A little."

"Well," Harry began, slowly turning his head back to the others, "since this is all so _very_ intriguing—"

"A little."

"—a _little_ intriguing, why don't we get started with… whatever it is we are about to do here."

"Certainly," McGonagall consented. "I'm sure you will be interested to know that we have at the very least established that you did in fact not utilize Apparition in your sleep."

"Oh, I knew it!" Hermione exclaimed excitedly, then quickly restrained herself when Harry shot her a look that by now was more irritated than bewildered. "I'm sorry," she said again, looking positively ashamed. "I can't help it."

Harry couldn't help but smile in spite of himself, yet he made sure to give her one last disapproving look before he turned his attention back to the experts. And Dobby.

"So," he said, trying to gather his thoughts. "I didn't apparate then?"

"Of course you didn't," answered Snape with blatant smugness. "I can personally attest to the fact that you are utterly incapable of pulling off an Apparition even when conscious. How then could you possibly be the only person to ever do it while enjoying pubescent dreams?"

Harry felt a rush of blood to his head and he could only hope it didn't show. Was Snape just teasing him in general, or did he know something specific about the less respectable paths his subconscious mind had recently trodden? He hadn't worn the bracelet that night, right? But what had he dreamed _last_ night? Surely he would remember if it had been something… worth remembering.

"Severus!" McGonagall cautioned him once more. "Mind your manners. There is no reason for insults."

"There is always reason for insults," Snape insisted sullenly, yet fell silent under another reprimanding glare from McGonagall.

"At any rate," the Head of House Gryffindor continued, "Apparition can be ruled out, as was expected given the glaring improbability of any such thing happening under these circumstances."

"Yes, indeed," Professor Flitwick concurred. "I can't imagine anyone – bar our friendly house-elves, of course – circumventing one of Professor Dumbledore's Anti-Apparition fields. It is not heard of, and fortunately remains just so."

"Besides," Snape casually added, "Apparition is a highly conscious process by its very definition, entirely dependent on the individual's magical focus to keep their bodily matter in perfect order and the simultaneous, complete concentration on the target destination. Without those it does not work, or cannot be called Apparition."

"Okay," Harry slowly said with a hint of impatience. "So now that we have established what I didn't do, what about explaining what exactly I _did_ do? Did Scotty beam me up, or what?"

He was met with collective, blank expressions of total incomprehension.

"Harry," Hermione accommodatingly assisted, "I don't think this is the best place for Muggle pop-cultural references."

McGonagall cleared her throat emphatically. "Moving on, I can tell you that we, for the lack of a more original term, have come to simply refer to your unintentional actions as _teleportation_. Granted, it is a bit generic in nature, for there are many different forms of teleportation, like Apparition, Portkeys and the Floo Network, but precise nomenclature isn't exactly our first priority here. Filius?"

"Yes, yes," the small wizard eagerly took over. "Magically it's a most peculiar thing, more akin to what the house-elves do than what we usually see a witch or wizard conduct by intention. That's also why the bracelet, of course, was unable to detect your teleportation. It works perfectly fine, as we were sure to test, and is entirely capable of detecting actual Apparition on its wearer."

Harry listened intently – and so did Hermione, but that's hardly worth mentioning –, hanging on to every word the professors spoke. When Flitwick's explanation came to a stop and the professor seemed to be somewhat puzzled at Harry's apparent lack of enthusiasm for these most fascinating insights, the boy looked at them expectantly.

"So?" he asked, somewhat apprehensively. "You aren't telling me I'm the first and only one something like this ever happened to, are you? We do know what this is, right?"

"Well," Professor Flitwick said evasively, "yes and no. A little of both, I suppose. Or maybe just plain no."

Harry's expression changed to incredulity, nervously looking back and forth between them.

"Relax, Mr. Potter," McGonagall tried to soothe him. "There is not… all that much to worry about. The phenomenon is not entirely unheard of, but it is still rather unexplored, barely defined at all to tell you the truth. There are only a few recorded incidents of people who seem to have teleported while unconscious, but it was never properly researched in a controlled environment. The incidents were too random and disconnected to be even thought of as correlating occurrences by most. It ended up being referred to as a _magical glitch _in common parlance."

"There was, for example," Madam Pomfrey chimed in at that point, "one Muggle-born witch by the name of Amelia Earhart, who was known from an early age to be prone to suddenly disappear, more often than not while she was asleep. Muggles made up the most ridiculous explanations to account for her unexpected disappearances and reappearances, but eventually she got it largely under control, even without ever attending a proper magical school. That is until one day in 1937 she vanished for good while piloting one of those Muggle flying machines across the Pacific Ocean. She was never seen or heard of again, at least not by any Muggle."

Harry looked outright horrified by the end of the matron's telling. "Are you saying that at some point I could disappear with no return as well?"

"Oh, we all wish," Snape mumbled mostly to himself, while Madam Pomfrey's eyes widened in shock at how her story had entirely missed its intended mark.

"What Poppy meant to say," McGonagall hastily stepped in, "was that there have in fact been comparable cases to your own, Mr. Potter, and while it has neither medically nor magically clearly been defined, we are confident that we understand enough of its magical properties to provide a remedy shortly."

Harry let out a sigh of relief at that and looked visibly more relaxed. He exchanged a brief, slightly nervous smile with Hermione, who nodded at him in encouragement.

"However," Professor Flitwick said, "no such examination can be called complete as long as the causality is not accounted for."

Then Madam Pomfrey spoke up again, with regained composure. "There are only three medical records about subconsciously triggered teleportation in the archives of St. Mungo's, and the two that contain any usable data at all about this strongly point to a state of great emotional distress in the patient at the time the teleportation took place. In both cases the teleportation seemed to have happened during one of the patient's REM sleep phases, and can therefore be associated with heightened brain activity and, potentially, dreams, which serves to explain the intense emotional sensations."

So much for Harry's relief. He did not like the direction this was heading into. Not at all.

"Indeed," Flitwick agreed happily, "the data our little bracelet collected unquestionably supports that theoretical framework. It recorded rapidly rising brain activity just prior to a rather abrupt end of information, which, of course, marks the point of your awakening, Mr. Potter. The fluctuations in your magical energy levels suggest exactly the kind of emotional turbulences we are talking about here. It's all very fascinating."

"I understand this is a delicate matter, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said quite caringly, "but I have no doubt you understand the importance of our research, which is only meant to guarantee your safety and good health. And, to be perfectly blunt, the order at our school. So I have to ask you, have you experienced a higher frequency of dreams lately? Nightmares, perhaps?"

Harry shifted uncomfortably and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

"I guess," he answered reluctantly. "I have generally had more nightmares over the course of the past few weeks again, yes."

"And did you have any of those prior to one or more of your teleportation incidents?" inquired McGonagall.

Even though four of the five faces that looked at him wore expressions of sympathy and concern, with Dobby not too far from crying, it was the one face that showed the most annoying smirk he had the hardest time to ignore. He didn't even dare to look at Hermione, who was watching him attentively from the side.

"There was one nightmarish episode prior to my first teleportation… thingy," Harry explained, his face heating up again. "There, uh… was another dream the second time, which wasn't… really… much of a nightmare. And I can't remember if or what I dreamed last night. Well, I think I actually dreamed Hermione was next to me, but as it turned out that wasn't a dream, so…"

Snape rolled his eyes and the others smiled more or less awkwardly, while Harry cleared his throat uneasily.

"I'm sure you'll agree that it is rather peculiar that your destination always seems to be the same," McGonagall told him. "We are merely trying to deduce why that is. So, can you tell us if Miss Granger was in any of those dreams that actually were dreams? It would seem to be the most obvious connection."

Harry would have very much liked to spontaneously disappear right about now, but whatever magical forces were responsible for his newfound, unintentional abilities, they forsook him entirely in that moment. So he did what was left to him and gulped. Then he cleared his throat again, and when he found something like a voice he croaked in what he hoped was the most casual croak available to him, "I guess so, yeah."

"And did something happen to her in those dreams?" McGonagall asked, genuinely concerned for him.

"Well," said Harry, delaying his answer for every second he could dare. "My nightmares are mostly about… losing people, and failing to save them. They often involve the suffering… the torture or death of people I hold dear, or those I already lost. Sometimes even of people I don't even know, their faces blurred and shapeless. But all of them in pain and despair; all of them crying, screaming, writhing and begging for mercy. And I can hardly ever do anything more than watch, because in those dreams I'm always too weak and powerless. And yes, the people closest to me are in those dreams nearly every time. That Hermione is one of them shouldn't need an explanation."

A silence ensued amongst them that let Harry hear naught but his own heartbeat. Bizarre as it made him feel at the same time, Harry couldn't help but be somewhat relieved that now at least he wasn't the only one in the room who seemed to be uncomfortable. Even Snape avoided looking at him, though he seemed determined to appear merely annoyed and didn't do the worst of jobs at it.

"Forgive my continuing enquiry, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said apologetically, "but it is of utmost importance to be fully clear about this matter, or else our attempts at finding a proper remedy will be bound to fail."

She waited for a response from Harry, and he nodded in understanding, albeit grudgingly.

"What details, if any, do you remember of the other dreams you had, prior to the second and third teleportation?" the professor asked him gently. "Was there any connection at all to the nightmare you had? Any recurring themes or similar elements?"

Harry couldn't be more aware of the fact that every pair of eyes in the room had returned to him, and with the heat that kept rising to his head he felt like he alone was standing in the limelight during a stage play. Standing ovations were probably not on the menu today, though. Right now he just hoped he'd survive the performance.

"Well, I, uh," he began stammering before he had actually made up his mind about what exactly to say, which he found ridiculously hard to do under these circumstances. "Well, like I said, I can only remember that one nightmare, and other than that… well, the one thing was probably not even a dream, like I said, and if it was then… it wasn't really much of a dream, right? But yeah, I guess you could say there was a minor similarity there. That similarity being Hermione. As a generic, recurring motif, if you will.

"Not to say that you are generic, which you really aren't by any stretch," he added as an afterthought, briefly facing Hermione who watched him with her eyes narrowed and her brows furled in concentration, and what Harry feared to be a possible hint of suspicion. He quickly turned to face the other five pairs of attentive eyes. Right now, surprisingly, those seemed oddly preferable to the one that was the most intense. "And then that other thing, the one before the second incident, was, uh, really just… some dream, you know? Average stuff, really. Sure, yeah, Hermione was there, but so was I and… and the environment."

For an awkward moment, time around him seemed to have stopped, and only the beating of his own heart drumming away inside his ears assured him that he was not frozen still as well. Then, two or three of the professors exchanged equally perplexed or skeptical looks.

"I see," Professor McGonagall finally said, though by all appearance she didn't seem to see anything at all.

"So there might very well be a direct correlation between Mr. Potter's dreams and the destination he teleports to," Professor Flitwick assessed with a satisfied smile. "I'd call that very valuable progress."

"The evidence is hardly conclusive, though," Snape remarked languidly, "since Potter doesn't seem to be dreaming of much else these days besides Miss Granger. And the environment, apparently."

At what point again did body temperature reach dangerous levels?

"Are you suggesting we should conduct further research under controlled circumstances?" Professor Flitwick asked the Head of House Slytherin.

"We could keep Mr. Potter here over night for a more detailed examination," Madam Pomfrey offered.

Harry watched the exchange with increasing apprehension, wondering if, although they were talking about him, they had somehow forgotten that he was standing right there.

"Is that really necessary at this point?" McGonagall asked worriedly. "It's not like the boy is teleporting into the high security vaults at Gringotts."

"But he _is_ teleporting into… _delicate situations_," Madam Pomfrey practically whispered, though that did not prevent it from being heard by everyone in the room.

"Well, it's really not all that delicate," Hermione interposed, instantly drawing the attention of all others and, consequently, regretting every word she had just said while turning a considerably deeper shade of red. "I mean, there's no… improper conduct… being conducted. And it's not like Harry is someone you or anyone else needs to protect me from, or that I even need that kind of protection for that matter. I can assure you that there are many who would not be looking as healthy as Harry right now after having teleported into my bed."

"To be fair," Harry chipped in, "you did have a rather impressive screaming attack the first time you found me next to you."

"Can you blame me?" Hermione asked him with a slight edge to her voice. "It's not like you notified me of your impending visit in advance."

"It wasn't exactly planned, you know?" Harry replied, a little taken aback.

"Well, I guess I can be happy I woke up at all," Hermione said sarcastically. "By the way, what exactly happened the first time you woke up in my bed?"

"Do you honestly think this is the best time to talk about that?"

"Why?" she challenged him, somewhat heatedly. "Is there anything about that you wouldn't want to speak of in front of the assembled company?"

Said assembled company looked back and forth between the two like a crowd following a match of Tennis.

"What? No, of course not," Harry defended himself. "It's just… personal, don't you think? In its general nature, not because of any indecent specifics. There were no indecent specifics. I even put the blanket back over your shoulders before I left."

"Wait," Hermione said, eying him suspiciously. "Where exactly _was_ the blanket?"

Harry gulped uneasily. "Well, I had to move it a little to get out of bed, right?"

"You were _under_ my blanket?"

Why did this mess insist on getting worse?

"Yeah, so?" he tried to challenge her right back. "How should I know how I got there? Maybe I teleported… differently than the second and third time. Heck, for all I know you could have been the one to put it over me!"

"Oh, and why exactly would I do that?"

"Because you wouldn't want me to be cold?"

"Yeah, well…" Hermione desperately grasped for a good retort, then eventually relented. "That actually sounds like something I would do. But I was sleeping, and if I had woken up I would probably have been more than a little confused to find _anyone_ lying next to me."

Harry shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, "It's not that important, anyway."

Both of them were looking anywhere but at each other at that point, and certainly not in the direction of the audience they had kind of forgotten about. Then Hermione spoke up again, her voice subdued.

"But you didn't… I mean, there wasn't anything… askew, or… loose, right?"

"What?" Harry asked blankly, until comprehension went over his features like a shockwave. "Oh. Oh! No, no! No, no, no. Nothing like that. Everything was in place. I really just put the blanket back over you right after I had gotten out of bed. I hardly saw your night gown at all. You know, the blue one with the flowery borders?"

Without caring much for giving Hermione the time to impersonate a tomato, Professor McGonagall harrumphed loudly at that and the two abruptly turned to look at her, as if only now they'd suddenly become aware of her presence again. Then someone spoke and everyone else was surprised and searching for the source for a moment – except for Snape, who had his face buried in one of his hands.

"Well," said Dobby in his familiar half squeaky, half croaky voice, "why don't we just give a simple Nonsomnium potion to Master Harry Potter for now, to see if the absence of any dreams at all prevents his spontaneous teleportation? If we alter too many variables at once we'll have a hard time making sense of anything."

Then he stopped. Maybe because he was finished, maybe because the sudden attention made him very uncomfortable. Probably both.

"That's actually a great idea," Professor Flitwick remarked appreciatively. "Poppy? Severus?"

"I have a few vials of Nonsomnium left in stock," Madam Pomfrey told them.

"I'm sure everyone is aware that this cannot be a long-term solution, even if it should end up delivering the desired results," Snape explained, his boredom more akin to genuine fatigue by now. "It falls under the classification of controlled substances and is not to be applied inconsiderately. We wouldn't want Potter to become an addict squandering all his precious riches in Knockturn Alley, now would we?"

"Of course not," the matron insisted emphatically, ever unable to get used to Snape's skewed sense of humor, if one would even go so far as to call it that. "I would personally not stand for applying it more than two or three times within an average period of treatment at most, and even then only under special circumstances. One dose tonight in combination with the readjusted bracelet should be a reasonable step towards solving this little puzzle, though. Mr. Potter has received it before under my supervision, when I applied a very small dosage to ease his nights during one of his longer stays in the hospital wing. He did not suffer any side effects, and I can personally attest to his bodily tolerance of the substance."

"Very well," judged Professor McGonagall after having listened attentively to every word her colleagues had spoken, then directed her eyes at Harry. "What do you think, Mr. Potter? This is a matter of your own health and your consent is paramount. You should not feel forced to comply. We could surely find alternative ways of getting to the bottom of this, and please note that there is no foundation for calling you sick in any sense of the word. We could simply try to reinforce the magical protection around the dormitories, but we would not make any progress in our understanding of your condition by doing so."

Harry thought about everything he had just listened to for a moment, but his decision seemed already to be set.

"I think I understand," he said. "And personally I'd prefer to know what this really is. I would feel kind of silly if Hogwarts had to improve its magical security measures because of me, to tell you the truth. Maybe there's a way to control this once I get to understand what it is."

He turned his head towards Hermione, searching her eyes for her opinion. The look and smile she gave him seemed to be a mixture of pride and agreement.

"If I'm not mistaken," she said pensively, "Nonsomnium shares basic chemical similarities to opium, which in its isolated form of morphine is frequently enough used in Muggle medicine as a strong analgesic drug when a patient is suffering under extreme pain."

"Yes," Snape confirmed. "The dried latex of the _Papaver somniferum_, or opium poppy, is indeed one of the ingredients. The final potion, however, contains less than one percent morphine. Physiological dependence would take months and many intakes to develop, and even though a psychological addiction can manifest itself much quicker, I believe none of us have any doubt about Potter's _extraordinary_ strength of will."

For once, everyone but Harry and Hermione seemed to be oblivious to Snape's blatant sarcasm and simply nodded their heads in agreement, giving Harry a few admiring looks as well.

"Well, I certainly don't plan on never dreaming again," said Harry, if only to skip the awkward moment. "There are some dreams worth dreaming, after all."

"Like the one with Miss Granger and the environment?" Snape asked mockingly, smirking when he saw both the teenagers' faces radiate in vibrant red once more. "There are, of course, potions that would enable you to dream the same dream over and over again, if so desired, until at some point you'd get so lost in your addiction to the illusion that the dream would only abruptly end one day when your heart explodes right in the middle of it. Now that's a potion that's actually interesting to make, but of course highly illegal, so I'm obviously not speaking out of experience."

"Severus!" a downright scandalized McGonagall admonished him. "Enough of this already!"

The flustered professor calmed herself with a deep breath, while Snape merely shrugged his shoulders indifferently. "So," McGonagall then said, "I believe we have come to a conclusion. Poppy?"

"Yes, yes," the matron swiftly replied, "Mr. Potter should come back here later tonight, at about ten thirty. The potion takes its full effect when applied just shortly before going to sleep. I will also hand him the bracelet again, which we'll have improved a little by then."

"Since we don't know the exact workings of the magic involved in this peculiar way of teleportation," Professor Flitwick explained, "we cannot calibrate the bracelet to detect it with any kind of precision. But it'll do a better job at monitoring both the fluctuations in Mr. Potter's magical energy levels as well as his relevant bodily functions so that tomorrow we'll be able to tell exactly what has changed under the influence of the Nonsomnium potion."

They all looked at Harry expectantly after that, and he eventually nodded in approval.

"Okay," he said with a rather constrained smile, and with that there was finally nothing much left to say or do.

Goodbyes were said – which for Snape came down to throwing one last, condescending smirk at Harry – and the group disbanded, with Professor Flitwick and, curiously enough, Dobby staying behind with Madam Pomfrey.

When Harry and Hermione were on their way to Gryffindor Tower, an unfamiliarly awkward silence hung heavily between them, and at some point it became so unbearable to the both of them that they chose the exact same moment to speak up. After a little back and forth of "You first," and "No, you first," and sharing a laugh about it, Harry finally relented.

"Well, I was actually about to say that it wasn't really all that bad," he revealed, "but now that I had time to think about it I've come to realize how ridiculous that would've been, because… honestly? It was pretty damn awful and I'm just glad it's over with."

"Yes," Hermione agreed, "it got a tad uncomfortable in parts."

"A tad?" Harry asked incredulously. "I don't think I've ever been less comfortable. And being me, that's saying something."

She threw him a sympathetic smile and they fell quiet for a few seconds again, until Harry asked her what she had been about to say just a minute ago.

"Oh, nothing really," Hermione answered evasively, and another silence ensued that was just on the verge of turning awkward again when she hastily sputtered, "So about that dream…"

"Oh, please not that," he groaned.

"Why not?" she asked, then sheepishly added, "I'm just curious, is all."

"Of course you are. But it's really not that big a deal."

"So exactly how red do you turn when something _is_ a big deal?"

"Yeah, well, you're the one to talk," he retorted clumsily. "You looked like a tomato more than once yourself back there."

"Are you trying to turn this around on me? Because that's not very classy."

"I'm not turning anything," he said defiantly. "I'm just trying to tell you that I don't want to talk about it."

With that there was silence once more and they quietly went their way for a while, until Hermione suddenly stopped and turned around to face him.

"Why not, though?" she asked him, and calmly so for the most part, with only a minor hint of something else beneath.

"Because," Harry said, a little startled by the suddenness of her question and, consequently, needing a moment to gather his thoughts. "It's… it's stupid, and shameful, and embarrassing, and—"

"Disgusting?" Hermione cut him off sharply.

"What?" a confounded Harry asked. "No, of course not. Why are you bringing that up again?"

She sighed, and crossing her arms turned to look out through a window, letting her eyes wander over the Hogwarts grounds where multiple groups of students were enjoying one of September's sunnier days.

"It's just that… well, I guess to me it seems like that little dream of yours is more embarrassing to you than I think it should be. I don't like the thought of being embarrassing to you."

"But… what? It's not you I find embarrassing, Hermione. How could you even think that? It's the dream _about_ you that's embarrassing. That's a considerable difference. And I honestly can't imagine you wouldn't feel exactly the same if it were the other way around, with the kind of dream we are talking about here."

"So it _was_ that kind of a dream!" she practically exclaimed, looking at him triumphantly as if she had just won at a quiz show. If he hadn't been so flabbergasted he'd probably have laughed.

"Wha—what? You… wait, I didn't—"

"But you did!" she excitedly interrupted his rather pitiful attempts at accomplishing a coherent sentence. "Or near enough. I mean, I couldn't believe it myself, even though the evidence kept piling up with the way you reacted to Professor McGonagall's questions back there, but only when Snape couldn't stop with his suggestive remarks did I begin to seriously consider the possibility. Since then I've pretty much played ping pong with the idea in my head, but now you've practically confirmed it."

"Confirmed what?" Harry was very close to making an actual movement with his hands, as much as he was feeling like he was grasping at the proverbial straws.

"Well," she said, her excitement waning quickly. "The kind of dream you had."

"And what kind would that be?" he asked as smoothly as he could manage, hoping that the heat he felt in his cheeks was not visually betraying him too plainly.

"Well," she said again, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear; her conviction exchanged with uncertainty and no small degree of nervousness by now. "It… it was, wasn't it? It was what we probably, unfortunately, both know I meant it was? Please tell me it was, or else I'll run into exile right now and never return."

Trying his hardest to suppress the smile that forcefully insisted on creeping over his lips, he savored the moment for a second or two and let Hermione look back and forth between his eyes in desperate search for an answer.

He sighed dramatically. "As tempting as it may be," he slowly said, "I do confess that it probably is what we unfortunately both think it is. But I guess I'm just relieved to see you're still generally familiar with the concept of embarrassment."

With her cheeks radiant with more than just the sunlight falling through the window, she glowered at him while tapping the fingers of her right hand on her left arm, mirroring Harry in so far as she was utterly unable to suppress the simultaneous smile that spread over her features.

"Why am I even embarrassed?" she then asked, her chin raised dignifiedly. "I was right and you're the one with the naughty dreams."

A considerable fraction of her flush seemed to be magically transferred back to Harry's cheeks at that, so now at least they seemed to be equal in their shame.

"You don't have to be so brazen about it," he mumbled abashedly, looking at his feet.

When a few seconds had passed and he didn't hear an answer, he raised his head again to find Hermione looking at him with an expression wherein many emotions seemed to be intermingled at once, smiling the warmest of smiles.

"Have I ever told you that you are the noblest soul I have ever met?" she asked him without a hint of anything but sincerity in her voice. "In fact, you are so noble and innocent sometimes that knowing you have naughty dreams helps a great deal in reminding me that you are not the unchanged little boy I once met on a train ride to a school with a ridiculous name."

He smiled tentatively. "So, uh, you don't think any less of me now?" he asked, pretty much in accordance with everything Hermione had just said.

"Why would I do that?" she asked, equally caring and incredulous.

"Well, don't you think it's a little… inappropriate? We've been friends for so long and I respect and admire you so much that it just made me feel cheap and repulsive to… to have a dream like that. I don't want to objectify you. Not even subconsciously. You are so much more than… than just… you know."

She furrowed her brows in puzzlement.

"_Hot_," he said in a furtive whisper, awkwardly clearing his throat afterwards.

Her eyebrows went straight up at that.

"You are obviously referring to your dream version of me there, mister," she said dismissively. "I can only imagine how many similarities were left. Are you even sure it was me?"

She was surprised to see that Harry seemed downright upset at that.

"Of course it was you," he insisted vehemently. "And though I obviously lack the, uh, waking state's data to compare my subconscious imagery to, from what I know – and I _have_ seen you in a bikini… on a picture – I'm pretty sure my imagination did not distort, exaggerate or… enlarge any areas. If anything, if you must know, I believe it hardly did you justice. It was all a bit blurry, really."

For once Hermione found herself speechless, having a hard time wrapping her head around the things Harry had just so naturally told her. She was so dumbfounded, in fact, that she didn't even find a way to process the implication that he had seen her naked in his dream, let alone react to it in any perceivable way.

"To be perfectly honest," he added as an afterthought, evidently oblivious to Hermione's dazed state, "you made me feel pretty damn inadequate."

"Inadequate?" Hermione asked, abruptly woken from her stupor.

"You know," he replied, scratching the back of his head and shuffling his feet on the ground for good measure. "Physically."

She raised a most disbelieving eyebrow at him. "Honestly, Harry," she said, "what do you see when you look into a mirror?"

He shrugged his shoulders, then looked up at her with a crooked smile. "A pale, skinny kid that grew up in a cupboard under a staircase?"

To his confusion, she sighed the strangest of sighs. Then, not to the lessening of his confusion, her eyes wandered over the entire length of his body once, finally arriving at his face again where they roamed freely for a moment. Then she looked him straight in the eye.

"Well," she softly spoke, "then you know nothing, Harry Potter."

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_Hermione's last line:_ Yeah, Ygritte called. She wants her line back. And by Ygritte I obviously mean the feisty wildling girl from George R.R. Martin's _A Song of Ice and Fire_, or HBO's corresponding _Game of Thrones_. I had a few alternatives for that last line, but somehow this little homage just wouldn't budge. I hope Mr. Martin wouldn't mind, given how opposed he is to fanfiction in general. But it's not like I'm writing some weird Harry/Ygritte crossover thingy. I would never do that to Jon Snow.

Also, Ygritte first appears in the second book of the series,_ A Clash of Kings_, first published in 1998. Since this story takes place the year before, it should be obvious to any attentive individual that it actually had to be the other way around: Ygritte stole her line from Hermione! Ha!

_Did Scotty beam me up:_ Alluding to the classic catchphrase _"Beam me up, Scotty"_ from the original Star Trek series, that – like other often quoted phrases _("Elementary, my dear Watson") _– isn't actually a verbatim quote, since it's never spoken exactly like that in the source material itself.

_Amelia Earhart:_ The idea to make a Muggle-born witch out of the famous aviation pioneer as an allusion to her "enigmatic disappearance" came to me quite spontaneously, just as I was writing the scene. Imagining her to have been a witch who _literally_ disappeared seemed quite funny to me. And who knows? Maybe she just vanished from the Muggle world after all, to exchange plane for broomstick. Much more eco-friendly.

I also cannot help but feel obliged to mention that there was in fact another person on board the _Electra_, who consequently vanished (as in perished) alongside Earhart on July 2, 1937; a man by the name of Fred Noonan. A woman remembered and a man forgotten? 21st century Internet vogue-feminists would be so delighted. Solely in the name of equality, of course.


	6. Inversion

**Author's Note: **I just wrote over 500 words about how there seem to be a lot of characters that a lot of people aren't very fond of and my views on the matter and some canon critique and my own preferred way to handle the whole affair... and then I remembered this isn't my very important blog about my very important opinions and that there's still a story to tell, so here it is. Story instead of commentary. It's a sad day for self-importance.

So, Chapter VI, folks! This is the longest one of the whole story by quite a margin, with only the last chapter coming close. Thought about splitting it up. Didn't do it. Had my reasons. A lot of scenes, though, so there are some opportunities for you to get something to drink or bring out the trash or go on vacation or something like that.

* * *

**• Chapter VI •**

**Inversion**

One of the most annoying things about Quidditch was that the stands for the audience were so high that they always took exhaustingly long to ascend, and virtually forever to _de_scend while slowly moving with the crowd. Sure, from a more neutral point of view one might have acknowledged how even the fans of Quidditch came to their regular exercise while enjoying their favorite game this way, but being right in the middle of it and not being very fond of being right in the middle of crowds in general, Hermione found herself quite unable to appreciate that aspect.

Instead she mentally busied herself with going through her inner spell book in search for something that might have helped her get through this at least a little faster; like making herself pervious or – even better – making the crowd disappear altogether. Seriously, how hard could it be to get down some stairs? You pretty much just have to let yourself fall from step to step. Didn't they have anywhere to be? Or couldn't they at least have some respect for those that did?

When the crowd she was so hopelessly trapped in finally reached the exit, she hastily rushed past the slowly dispersing lot and headed straight for the locker rooms, hoping she hadn't spent as many ages trying to get down the stands as it had felt like. Then again, maybe she should've just headed back to the castle with all the others and congratulated him there. There was no guarantee he'd still be here – that much time she had definitely lost on those bloody stairs. But something made her go her way nonetheless, and finally arriving at the entrance to the Gryffindor locker room, she tentatively knocked on the door and then, when no response came, carefully peeked inside, wondering for a split second what she was even doing there and then quickly putting that thought aside.

The room seemed devoid of people, although the stale air that came her way, thick with the intermingled body odors of too many sweaty individuals, was testament to their recent occupation of the room. Scrunching up her nose in disgust she stepped inside despite her olfactory organ's protests. Boys surely are one smelly affair.

Slowly and quietly she walked past the lockers that were lined up at the wall, with a long wooden bench stretching for the whole length in front of them. Over each of them hung a woolen banner all in red, waving gently in a wind that wasn't there; with golden borders and flocking showing a large number and a name below. When she reached the locker that had the number 7 up above, she paused. _Potter_, it read below in shining letters.

Of all the lockers this one was the only one that stood open, and inside hung the uniform its wearer had neatly put back into its place, while a few pieces of protective gear were still strewn out on the bench below. She wouldn't usually consider a sports uniform especially sexy by any stretch of the imagination, but lately she couldn't help but notice how _he_ really made it work quite naturally. Most noticeably, his whole demeanor somehow changed, along with his posture as soon as he put this uniform on, as if he left all his burdens, his worries and, yes, his doubts and insecurities behind in this very locker whenever he took the uniform out.

"You know, fans aren't usually allowed in here."

She cringed violently and whirled around with a sharp intake of breath.

"I was just—" she began hastily, but then abruptly found herself bereft of the ability to speak when she saw who had just spoken to her and how exactly he looked.

A few small steps away from her stood Harry, the very person she had been looking for – and, as it turned out, so very unprepared to find; with his slightly damp hair even more disheveled than usual, smiling lopsidedly at her with his head cocked to his side. And Harry, as was plainly impossible not to notice, was clad in much less than a person could potentially be clad in, with no more than a red, knee-long towel – and nothing but – loosely wrapped around his waistline.

His skin shimmered wetly, if from water or from sweat she didn't even have the presence of mind to discern. Small pearls of the clear liquid slowly ran down his chest and his arms, along the lines of his shapely muscles; naturally defined and proportioned. The form of his body was lean and athletic; his arms long and deceptively strong, his legs unbowed and his shoulders broad for his size and strikingly straight from end to end. When it had last been applicable to call him scrawny in any sense of the word she could not recall.

"What?" he asked amusedly, still smiling even while giving her a quizzical look.

With this most complicated of questions registering somewhere between her ears only slowly, she searched for something resembling a legitimate answer – anything, really.

What she ended up saying sounded an awful lot like _yum._

He raised an eyebrow at her, which she of course hardly noticed since she had an uncharacteristically hard time concentrating on his face, what with following that single, playful drop of whatever it was running down over his stomach towards the finest line of hair between belly button and the region that towel insisted on covering…

"Gum?" he asked, genuinely puzzled.

"What?" she asked, shaking herself ever so slightly and finally forcing her eyes to look up to where eyes properly were supposed to be directed. The way he looked at her, however, did not serve to steady her knees.

"I, uh, just meant to ask why you're here, is all," he said nicely. "Not to rush you or anything. It's just that I was about to take a shower and I came back here because in one of my more cerebral moments I actually managed to forget my shampoo."

"Oh," she said, and then for a few awkward seconds nothing else followed. "Right. I mean, I really just wanted to congratulate you on the victory and the great game you played and all that. It was quite spectacular."

"Thanks," he replied, grinning from ear to ear. "But since when does Quidditch make you borderline euphoric?"

"Well," she answered a little unsurely, "it really all depends on the players who play it, doesn't it?"

He nodded as his right hand went to the conspicuously sloppy knot that kept his towel in place and loosely closed around it.

"So which ones do you like?" he asked her in perfect innocence.

"_Hmmm_," she made, pretending to think about that very carefully. "Well, there's that one guy I really like, I guess."

"Yeah?" he asked, and she couldn't help but feel that he stood just a tiny step closer to her. "And why's that?"

"He's just a very special player," she replied in a halting voice.

"Is that so?" he asked with another casual step towards her, his voice inexplicably deeper all of a sudden. "And what makes him so _very_ special, I wonder."

She felt herself gulp involuntarily, her throat going dry within an instant. Then she noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

"His broomstick," she blurted out, then gave off the slightest of sighs in frustration over her own clumsiness.

"Oh?" he asked, with overacted surprise. Then he took another step towards her that brought him within arm's reach of her. "And what do you like so much about his... _broomstick_?"

"I guess I'm just really impressed with the way he handles it," she answered, and by now even her own voice sounded strangely unfamiliar to her; a phenomenon she didn't find much time to ponder as Harry made yet another step towards her, closing the distance between them to barely more than a foot. She might have tried to take a small step backwards, but she already felt her calves press against the bench behind her.

"And how does he handle it?" he asked, his eyes not once leaving hers.

"With complete and utter control," she slowly spoke, emphasizing every single word. "It always goes exactly where he commands it to go, and it always moves precisely at the speed he requires. Every elegant turn, every decisive rise, every sudden stop and every gentle, every forceful thrust happens at his own will."

"Sounds like a guy who knows what he's doing," he said, making one last step to close all distance that was left between them; their bodies now a mere inch away from touching.

"Uh-huh," she weakly breathed, abashedly averting her eyes from his only to find that staring at his glistening chest, calmly rising and falling, did not improve her general clarity of mind.

"So," he said, and she could feel his breath tickling her neck as he leaned in even closer. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Don't you want to try it for yourself?"

"Try what?"

"Handling my broomstick," he answered huskily, his lips nearly touching her ears and moving down along her neckline as he spoke, hovering just above her skin. "Maybe take it for a ride yourself."

"You think I could do that?"

"Why not?" he asked with a breathy voice. "It's quite sturdy."

"I don't doubt my ability to handle your broomstick," she whispered cravingly, "it's your broomstick's ability to handle me I'm worried about."

"Trust me," he said in his deepest voice, leaning his head back to look straight at her with his left hand resting lightly at her jawline; his emerald eyes ablaze with unveiled desire. "It will get the job done."

As his lips slowly descended onto hers, parting ever so slightly, and she closed her eyes in anticipation, she felt his right hand gently cup the other side of her face – and a towel dropped to the floor.

Hermione opened her eyes and found herself breathing rapidly in the dark. Even though she could hardly see anything her eyes went back and forth in confusion and disorientation, until slowly but surely her consciousness took over and made her realize that she had just woken up from a dream, which instantly wiped the stupid grin from her face she was irritated to discover had been on her lips.

And only then, like a flash of lightning jolting through her whole body, did she suddenly realize _what_ dream she had just awoken from. Within an instant she sat straight up with her eyes widened in blank horror, her blanket falling off her shoulders. Down by her feet lay Crookshanks, who gave her a look that suggested he would be raising a quizzical eyebrow at her right now if only he'd had one at his disposal. He didn't seem to approve.

"Children of an idle brain, my arse!" she said out loud, putting a hand to her head and grabbing her hair in disbelief. "Who _talks_ like that?"

~•~

"You look like crap, mate."

"Thanks," said Harry without looking up at his friend, preferring to concentrate on lacing his shin guards instead. "You too."

"Yeah, well, I got kicked out of bed even though I've got three free periods today that I would've very much liked to spend sleeping. By you, no less," Ron protested, having a good yawn to emphasize his point. "What's your excuse?"

"I guess I don't have one," answered Harry rather flatly. "I slept the whole night through, without so much as an interruption."

"Oh, right. That potion, huh? Did it work?"

Harry shrugged his shoulders indifferently. "Guess so."

Mustering his friend with attentive eyes, Ron went on to ask, "No dream at all?"

"Can't remember anything."

"And you didn't do your teleportation thingy either?"

"Nope."

Ron watched him quietly for a moment as Harry morosely proceeded to put on his elbow pads as well, then a knowing smile spread across his lips and nodding he said, "So that's the way the wind's blowing."

"What are you talking about, Ron?" Harry asked, more than a little irritated. Then, annoyed with his own temper, he looked up at him and found Ron raising his eyebrows at him.

"Must've been one relaxing night you had there," he said, grabbing his own set of elbow pads from his locker.

Sighing heavily Harry said, "Could we please just keep to the point, here?"

"Sure," Ron answered easily. "What point?"

"How about the point of you not making the team if you don't get your act together?" replied Harry, a little more aggressive than intended and instantly rueful about it. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm not trying to be mean here, but it's true. If I were to put you into the starting seven instead of McLaggen right now, people would call it nepotism – and rightfully so, with the shape you're in."

"Well, sorry," said Ron, patting his stomach a little too affectionately. "I still have a little vacation weight on me. You should've seen the buffet they had down there. Man, that was one sight to behold."

Harry looked at him with a weird mixture of disapproval and amusement, waiting for him to snap out of his culinary daydream. Eventually he did.

"What's that git even doing here anymore?" he asked, looking at McLaggen's locker in plain annoyance. "Shouldn't he have graduated last year?"

"Apparently he wasn't satisfied with his N.E.W.T. results," Harry explained concisely.

"Oh? So just because McLaggen's ambitious I have to work harder?" Ron asked, not without a healthy dose of self-deprecation.

Harry, although not quite able to suppress a smile at the same time, shook his head at him. "There's actually a rather promising kid in second year as well, if you must know. He's a little small, but very quick."

"Now you're just trying to intimidate me."

"Yeah, that's what I usually use my twelve-year-old acquaintances for."

When Harry was just about to put his gloves on, Ron pointed towards his wrist and said, "Hey, where's your pretty bracelet?"

Harry raised an eyebrow at him. "You're awfully perceptive for someone who was pretty much sleepwalking less than five minutes ago," he remarked, and only then answered the question. "I already dropped it off at Madam Pomfrey's office before I came here."

Ron merely nodded, then stood up and grabbed his broom. When Harry followed suit, Ron again looked surprised.

"Your Firebolt?" he asked rather incredulously. "It looked more like fire_wood_ yesterday. That was one hell of a collision. You fixed it up quite nicely."

"No way could I've done that myself," said Harry, looking at the gift he had once unknowingly received from Sirius so seemingly long ago. "Hermione did it. She came right down here after the crash."

"Guess she must've been really worried about your broom," Ron quipped.

"It's just a good thing she was doing her homework sitting in the stands again," said Harry, deliberately ignoring Ron's comment. "She helped with Dean's arm too, and there wasn't all that much left for Madam Pomfrey to do, as she told me earlier."

Harry didn't notice the way his friend was looking at him, for he was far too busy with looking at his Firebolt in admiration and reminiscence; lost in his very own thoughts.

"So," Ron casually spoke up after a while, "you think it really were the dreams that caused your teleportation?"

"Maybe," Harry replied evasively. "I don't know. Might be a coincidence that it didn't happen last night, or maybe the potion just messed with whatever it is my brain does while I'm sleeping. Could be a whole lot of things, I reckon."

"But you did dream about Hermione the nights before?"

"Seriously, Ron," Harry groaned. "I was practically interrogated twice already this week and I think that's quite enough for me, thank you very much."

"Yeah, but I'm your friend," said Ron, giving him the puppy eyes. "And I feel so left out."

"A pain in the arse is what you are," Harry told him, rolling his eyes even while smiling. "But honestly, it's not like I have sultry dreams about Hermione _every_ night. That's not how it happened."

"Wait," said Ron, even while Harry realized his mistake on his own. "Not _every_ night? Last time I checked you told me you'd _never_ had any such dream about her at all. If I remember correctly, that was, what, three days ago?"

Wondering if his cheeks would ever be able to recover from this strangest of weeks, Harry felt the heat radiating from his face once more. "Well, it was true at the time!"

He received another raised eyebrow in response. Desperately searching for a way out of this and failing miserably, he surrendered with slumped shoulders and a weak sigh.

"There might have been one such dream," he reluctantly admitted, and then added in defiance, "Incidentally right after the day you kept going on about it, so we might as well call it your fault."

"Oh, sure," Ron replied in mock agreement. "I always knew I could control other people's dreams! Trelawney would be so proud."

Harry didn't appear to be planning any kind of response, for he silently proceeded to close his locker and then, when he had accomplished that, busied himself with readjusting his gloves.

"So," Ron began anew, clicking his tongue, "was it any good?"

When Harry instantly turned to look at him he found his friend grinning from ear to ear. Just as quickly Harry looked away again and decided to readjust the same glove again he had just finished with.

"What kind of question is that?" he mumbled under his breath.

"The kind with a question mark at the end?" When Harry merely mumbled something else into his nonexistent beard in response, Ron continued, "Come on, now. If we want to blame me for causing it, we might at least let me know what exactly I brought onto you. I wouldn't want to be responsible for… bad entertainment."

Harry gave off an exasperated sigh, aimed half at Ron and half at himself for realizing that he was now officially wearing the most readjusted pair of gloves in the history of mankind.

"I promise," Ron tried to encourage him further, "I won't ask _why_ it was good, I won't ask for any details and I won't even ask if it was good _because_ of any specific people that appeared in it. Just tell me if it was good in a general sense. It's a totally harmless question. Was it a good dream?"

Harry neatly put down his broom, leaning it against the bench. Then he opened his locker again, looked for nothing in particular and surprisingly didn't find it, then closed the locker again. Then he slowly and most thoroughly flattened the perfectly flat sleeves of his jersey; first the left, then the right. Then he scratched his neck, and then picked his broom up again. With Ron watching him attentively with the most amused expression on his face, he sighed – if only because he didn't know what else to do by now.

"Yes," he then said.

"Did you guys do it in your dream?" Ron immediately asked, and when Harry raised his broom at him in a playfully threatening gesture, he raised his hands in surrender, hastily saying, "I'm kidding, I'm kidding!"

"Well," said Harry with a lopsided grin, shouldering his Firebolt and heading towards the exit that lead straight to the pitch, "we probably would have, if I hadn't woken up."

Ron followed him excitedly. "Seriously? Like, for real?"

"No, Ron," Harry answered in a deadpan manner, turning around to face him when they stood just in front of the door. "In a dream."

His friend grimaced at him.

"Could we please concentrate on Quidditch now?" Harry asked. "We have a lot of work to do if we want to get you back on track before the first game of the season."

"Yeah, yeah," Ron casually disregarded his seriousness with a wave of his hand. "Quidditch, Shmidditch."

Harry raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Did you just actually dismiss the importance of Quidditch?"

"Wow," Ron breathed, blinking in disbelief over himself. "I think I just did. This can't be good. I'll lie down in shame tonight."

"Well, if it's any consolation, I'm sure Quidditch will get over it."

When Harry opened the door after that and was just about to step outside, Ron made him pause when he spoke up again.

"Seriously, though," he said. "I mean… I just want to say that, all jokes put aside for a moment, that… you could talk to me, you know? I realize this has been a pretty crazy week for you and I know the whole situation makes you uncomfortable and that more often than not you prefer to deal with stuff on your own and all, but… it's not always the best way to go about things, right? But even I get there are things you maybe just aren't ready to say, or something. I guess all I want to say is that… I'm here, you know?"

For one speechless moment, Harry didn't react at all. Then a smile began to curl up one corner of his lips. Ron looked positively bashful.

"You want to hug it out with a nice little dosage of bromance," Harry asked him, "or would you prefer a rough, manly clap on the back?"

"Well, now you've just ruined the moment," Ron mumbled in mock disappointment.

They shared a short yet no less heartfelt laugh about it.

"Thanks," Harry then said. "Really. I appreciate it."

Ron nodded his head while looking at his feet. "You think I could maybe ask you one last question?" he then asked with uncommon diffidence. "A serious one. And just the one."

Harry sighed, albeit mostly for show. "Go on then, if you must. But just the one, really."

"Okay," Ron agreed elatedly, looking up at him. "So, here it goes. You woke up in Hermione's bed three nights in a row, right? That's not the actual question, but I need some validation here."

Harry, scratching the back of his head while taking a newfound interest in the doorframe, answered with a nod.

"And now you didn't," Ron went on. "Maybe because the potion worked and you really did teleport because of your dreams, maybe not. Doesn't matter. You woke up, well, the way you used to wake up until any of this happened. In your own bed, by yourself. Like the ordinary rest of us. So, my actual question is, are you happy or relieved that you did, or are you something else?"

Harry went up and down the dark lines of the wood grain of the doorframe with his thumb, lost in his thoughts for a few long seconds that passed in silence, until he took in a deep breath which he then exhaled in a long, heavy sigh.

"Maybe… probably… mostly something else."

Ron nodded sympathetically. "See? That wasn't so hard."

"Not for you, I'm sure," Harry replied. "Anyway. Now that that's thankfully over with, would you be ready for some actual Quidditch practice?"

Ron shrugged his shoulders. "I guess," he mumbled listlessly.

"Hey, don't give me that defeatist attitude," Harry told him. "I want to hear your uncompromising determination and willpower."

"I guess!" Ron exclaimed with unbridled enthusiasm, and so the both of them finally went out onto the Quidditch pitch together – brooms ready and spirits high. Mostly.

~•~

Going straight from the freedom of flight into the confines of the Hogwarts dungeons could be a challenging transition to make, especially considering that going into the dungeons was a challenge in and of itself for all those students who were not used to the cool, damp atmosphere that was most bearable when at least there hadn't yet been a Potions class that day to fill the corridors with oftentimes nauseating smells. It was, after all, Slytherin territory, and accordingly referred to as _The Snake Pits_ by some of the other Houses' students, or _The Winding Bowels_ by some of the more imaginative minds, while those more outspoken and less metaphorically inclined simply tended to call it _The Stink_.

Harry and Ron, freshly showered after their exhausting practice session, were already waiting in front of Professor Snape's classroom with a group of Gryffindors and Slytherins – or rather two groups, meaning one of each – when Hermione arrived and joined them. When she greeted them, Harry couldn't help but notice how her eyes barely flickered in his general direction while at the same time she didn't appear to have any problem at all with looking at Ron.

"How was your practice?" she asked conversationally, without looking at anyone in particular.

"Ask me that in three weeks again when you'll see McLaggen sitting on the bench without showing off any of his stupidly white teeth," Ron answered coolly.

"Hey!" someone behind him complained. "I heard that."

Ron turned no more than he needed to in order to face the one who had just spoken. "Oh, I'm sorry, Cormac," he said without the slightest attempt to sound sincere. "But I really don't give a toss."

"That's great, Ron," Harry disapprovingly remarked, even while having a hard time fighting the grin that forced its way onto his lips. "You're doing wonders for our team chemistry there."

"Yeah, well," said Ron, "it's not team chemistry that keeps the Quaffle out of your goal hoops. By the way, Hermione, I think you've blown the job on Harry's broomstick."

Hermione winced visibly, as if abruptly and most unpleasantly woken from a daydream. "Excuse me?" she asked with her cheeks appearing to be slightly flushed all of a sudden; utterly bewildered and, in all her confusion, quite affronted as well.

"It splintered," Ron explained haltingly, startled at her unexpectedly touchy reaction.

"It's just a minor fracture," Harry was quick to explain, and for the first time Hermione's attention switched to him. "I think I'll have to send it in and get a thorough checkup from the guys in Diagon Alley. But you did a great job, Hermione. Honestly. It felt great. I just went too hard at it, I guess. And with the damage it took yesterday it's really not surprising. This is exactly the kind of thing experts are for, so please don't feel bad about it, okay?"

For an awkward moment Hermione merely stared at him – or maybe straight through him – with unmitigated confusion still frozen on her features. Then she blinked.

"Right," she said, shaking herself. "The Firebolt. Your… your broom. A fracture, you say? Wait, nothing happened to you, right?"

"Nah," Harry casually reassured her. "Really, just the smallest of cracks exactly in the spot where it practically broke yesterday. It happened when I took an unnecessarily hard turn. Should've gone easier on it."

Hermione gave a nod in response, saying, "Good, good," and averting her eyes again, fiddling around with the school bag that she had strapped over her shoulder. Harry and Ron watched her for a second or two, then shared a clueless look; Harry shrugging his shoulders.

"You seem awfully flustered today, Herms," Ron remarked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Immediately her head jerked up, her eyes sparkling dangerously. "If you call me _Herms_ again I swear you'll be far worse than flustered, Ronald."

"There you go," he merrily announced to Harry. "I fixed her."

Just in that moment – without leaving Hermione much time to glare at Ron, let alone decide which spell to use to hex him into oblivion – the door to the class room swung abruptly open and Professor Snape brusquely bade them enter, vanishing just as quickly as he had appeared. And thus, once more, four whole hours – the curse of being in seventh year – of brewing murky liquids in steaming cauldrons with everybody's favorite teacher began.

Today they were to make the antidote to the poisonous bite of the horned desert basilisk, which being in northern Scotland seemed a bit weird to say the least, but once the initially amused students began to realize just how difficult and tedious the procedure of its creation was, the jovial mood quickly diminished – with Snape's own mood behaving exactly opposed to that of his class, of course.

When, after twenty minutes of intricate instructions, the somewhat dazed students began to gather their utensils and ingredients and got to work in their usual pairs of two, Harry and Hermione did so without many words and with a lot of nervous glances and awkward motions, which distracted Harry immensely since he had been under the impression that the whole awkwardness that had persisted between them for the greater part of the week seemed to have subsided at least a little bit the day before.

She avoided looking at him, she barely spoke a real sentence and once she even flinched back from him when his hand lightly, unintentionally grazed hers. It was all beginning to irk him excessively.

If anything, he thought, it should be him acting like Hermione paradoxically did, after the talk they had about his _dream_. Was she suddenly embarrassed about her own outspokenness? That didn't make any sense. Or did it? He threw her what he hoped was a casual glance, and she looked up from her book and just as quickly away again.

_Oh, no! She's uncomfortable around me because of the things I told her! Because of the dream!_

But why then had everything felt so normal in the locker room after Quidditch team practice last night? She had been her usual self; concerned, caring and ridiculously competent. After Dean had left with his arm looking much more regular than before Hermione had administered what she herself simply called first aid – even though Harry was quite sure she could give a few employees at St. Mungo's a run for their money with stuff like that – she had pretty much reached straight for his broomstick and inspected it closely, handling it with great care and no lesser interest. To her, of course, it probably had looked less like a broken broom and more like a challenge.

After she had mended the fracture with the help of her wand, she had tenderly run her fingers up and down the wood with Harry watching her in amazement. It really had seemed as good as new and he couldn't even begin to explain how in Merlin's name she had done it. _Brilliant_ – as so often before – had been the first word to come to his mind and, eventually, over his lips, and Hermione, blushing ever so slightly, had smiled very happily at him in response – even while talking what he could only describe as modest nonsense to downplay her accomplishment.

Granted, after that there might have been one particular moment that probably could be called kind of awkward in a sense, when Harry had helped her back to her feet and they had ended up standing right in front of each other with their chests lightly brushing against one another, and with his hands somehow ending up resting lightly against both sides of her waist. She had initially held her head slightly bowed so that, even with her not being all that much smaller than him, he couldn't see her face, and her forehead had been barely an inch away from his lips.

He vividly remembered the moment she had looked up at him, her eyes flickering over his face and then locking with his for a few, incredibly intense seconds that made his heart beat in a frenzy. He had been unable to keep his eyes from switching back and forth between her eyes and her mouth, and he couldn't remember ever having noticed the perfect shape and color of those lips of hers. They had shimmered faintly in the light, and they had been so slightly, so beguilingly agape…

Goodness, how could anyone be this pretty even while having their hands in some kind of green glibber, with their hair all messy, their face flushed and sweaty and a smear of some blackish powder on their nose? And then those dark and haunting eyes, their endless depth a daring place to tread, where one could either find oneself or else get lost in completely. Or maybe both at the same time.

"Harry?"

_Bloody hell! She's actually looking right at you! Hello? React, you fool!_

"Yah?" was all he could manage to get from his hopelessly overwhelmed larynx. He blinked himself back into the waking world and clumsily fumbled for the mortar and pestle he had only halfheartedly put to use so far.

"The lapis lazuli powder?" Hermione asked him, and from the manner in which she asked he could tell that she didn't ask for the first time.

"Yah!" he said, nodding violently and hastily getting back to work. "Coming right up."

Harry kept quietly pounding and grinding away on the tiny blue flakes for a while, slowly but surely turning them into the fine powder Hermione had requested for reasons sadly unknown to him, but he was confident that it had something to do with what they were supposed to do.

_That's just great. I was actually planning on being the one to ask _her_ what's going on with _her_ today, and now I've already made such a fool out of myself again that the world might as well ask _me_ instead what the bloody hell's wrong with _me_! _

"So what's wrong with you?" he suddenly blurted out, turning to face Hermione expectantly.

She looked at him with a puzzled expression and remained motionless for a moment. Then she broke out into laughter, and when she didn't stop, Harry found himself joining her, if a little unsurely.

"What?" he asked her abashedly in between chuckles.

"I'm sorry," she answered, panting heavily after her little bout of laughter, "but you just looked like a psychopath at a cooking contest, with mortar and pestle in your hands and that weird, angry look on your face. And you also just asked me what's wrong with _me_, after _you_ were practically staring at me and having Merlin knows what kind of out-of-body experience just about three minutes ago."

_Told you so. Wait, who am I talking to?_

"And by the way," Hermione added with her eyebrows perked up, "I think you've actually begun to grind away at the mortar itself with your pestle there."

The incessant motion of his hand came to an abrupt halt, and making a sulky face at her he handed her the bowl with the tiny mound of blue powder in it.

"Well," he then said, just a tad surly, "could we, by any chance, ignore that regrettable episode of mine and both admit to the fact that my question was still legitimate in nature, since you _are_ acting a little weird today?"

"Am I?" she asked innocently.

Harry, leaning against the table with his hip, pursed his lips, but Hermione seemed to pointedly keep herself busy with her ingredients and the measurement of their dosages.

"Come on," he insisted, though warmly so rather than harshly. "You can talk to me. Did you have a bad dream or something? Because I'm a proven expert on the subject."

Harry didn't even have enough time to notice the pink color spreading over Hermione's cheeks as his attention was suddenly taken by another voice speaking up from behind him.

"Are we making progress?" Snape asked them sourly, his eyes glancing over the mess on their table coldly and deprecatingly.

"Well, I was," Harry casually replied. "Until I got interrupted."

Snape's eyes narrowed, blazing menacingly. But before he could retort in any way, Hermione intervened.

"We're all good, Professor," she said in her best model pupil manner. "Thank you for asking."

Snape curled his lips and skeptically eyed the contents of their cauldron. Whatever he might have thought about those his unchanged expression didn't reveal.

"It has come to my attention that the Nonsomnium potion has brought about the result we were indubitably _all_ hoping for?" he asked them sardonically.

Harry merely nodded curtly in response, his lips tightly compressed into a straight line.

"Lovely," said Snape, and it was hard to imagine the word could sound any less lovely. "Now we'll just have to find a way to keep you house-trained and docile without putting you under the effects of an addictive, mind-altering drug."

Harry didn't get further than opening his mouth before Hermione preempted him.

"It's rare to see a professor care so much for the wellbeing of his students," she said, her voice downright syrupy. "It's most admirable, and very much appreciated."

Snape considered her with the weakest, wriest smile that barely curled up one crooked corner of his lips.

"I'm sure," he said slowly, then turned his eyes back to Harry with his head following suit. "You will be expected back at the infirmary at eight o'clock tonight," he told him emotionlessly, then looked genuinely amused at the way Harry's expression changed into one of apprehension, and smugly added, "Sadly, I will not be attending today's performance."

Eyeing their bubbling cauldron one last time he gruffly advised, "Mind the temperature," and went his way to gallantly support some other students.

With an irritated growl escaping his lips, Harry turned around to see Hermione already going back to work – and without delay, of course, making sure the temperature of the liquid in their cauldron was exactly according to instructions.

"So, where was I?" Harry asked pleasantly, and at least Hermione couldn't entirely suppress a lopsided smile.

"Seriously, Harry," she admonished him nonetheless, "we should really focus on getting this done right."

"Well," he replied, "when you think about it, this hasn't really been the best of weeks for things that _should_ be done."

She gave him a warning look and, playful as it was, it still served to make him relent and do his part in their teamwork with at least a minimum amount of concentration.

The following hour passed rather uneventfully, for a change. Near the end of class even Harry had caught up and was slowly but surely beginning to understand what they were doing, proudly presenting Hermione exactly the flask of whatever it was inside before she even asked for it at one point. When the time had come to bottle a sample of their results for Snape to review before their next lesson, Ron and Neville, working at the table right next to Harry's and Hermione's, looked at their own cauldron most warily.

"Well," said Ron, poking the unintentionally gooey and abominably stinking substance with the handle of a large wooden spoon, with plain disgust showing on his features, "I'm not quite sure it'll do anything against the venom of a horned desert basilisk, but it might just be able to poison it right back."

"And if not," Neville added, looking equally doubtful, "we'll just throw the damn cauldron right at it."

Snape didn't appear to be all that amused.

When they had all finished cleaning up and were finally allowed to hastily flee from the nearly unbearable stench that Ron and Neville so kindly had impregnated the air in the whole class room with, and Harry and Hermione were approaching the exit, Harry – to his great, subsequent regret – was unable to keep his eyes from flickering briefly to Draco Malfoy, who seemed to be expecting them near the door. As soon as green and grey met, the little prince of Slytherin spoke up.

"So," he drawled with a blasé, lopsided sneer, speaking loud enough to involve everyone that was still left around them, "you are actually shagging the Mudblood now, aren't you? And here I thought you couldn't possibly stoop any lower, Potter. I mean, I get the whole notion of opportunism – really, I do – but this? Come on, this should be beneath even the likes of you."

Boiling over like instant noodles over dragon fire, Harry started towards Malfoy, but Hermione gently put her hand on his arm and held him back before he had even made a single step.

"Don't," she told him calmly. "He's not worth it."

Irritated, he turned to face her. "But—"

She shook her head. "Violence won't change him," she said, giving Malfoy a look of what at least to Harry disturbingly seemed to be nothing else but pity. "I reckon violence is part of what made him who he is, besides a severe lack of love and attention. You cannot give what you never received. It would be more sensible to give him a hug once in a while."

Behind them Ron and Neville at first snickered, then snorted with laughter once Hermione had finished. The perennial smirk was, of course, for once wiped entirely off of Malfoy's face, and his usually pale skin seemed to have found a little color at last. Next to him, Crabbe, Goyle and Pansy Parkinson, for the lack of comprehension, chose to look at Hermione in something that supposedly was meant to resemble hostility, but still ended up looking like a great deal of incomprehension nevertheless.

"Are you sure?" Harry asked, just a little confused even while he had a hard time holding on to his anger.

Hermione nodded her head once. "You don't have to hug him right away, though."

Harry visibly relaxed at that, although he overplayed it just a little by wiping his perfectly dry forehead with the back of his hand. "Phew, for a moment you had me really worried there," he said jokingly, while Malfoy, utterly unnoticed by both Harry and Hermione, still watched their exchange with the weirdest expression distorting his features.

"Will I be seeing you later?" Harry then asked her.

"Of course," she answered. "Although I won't be at dinner in the Great Hall since we have a prefect meeting at seven o'clock, so it could get late. We'll be discussing this year's Halloween festivities."

Harry raised an eyebrow at her. "Gosh, you guys sure like to plan ahead, huh?"

"You do realize who's in charge, right?"

His lips spread into a grin. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't there also be a Head Boy with just as much to say as you?"

"Oh, sure," Hermione replied with an impish smile. "What's his name again?"

He slowly shook his head at her in disapproval, his beaming smile blatantly negating any graveness one might have expected to be in said disapproval.

"Anyway," he said, "have fun with your dictatorial party planning, then."

"Thanks. And you have fun… in the infirmary."

"Now that's just mean," he remarked in mock consternation, whereupon they simply smiled at each other for one quiet moment.

Then, suddenly and certainly unexpectedly, yet not abruptly, he leaned in to her and lightly kissed her on her cheek, his lips lingering on her skin just a second too long to call it a peck.

"I'll wait up for you," he softly said. "Tell you about all the fun I'll certainly have had."

Hermione, feeling completely bedlam on the inside and hoping to seem perfectly composed on the outside, gave him one last smile that felt annoyingly jittery on her lips, and left.

Harry watched her go with a faraway expression, then shook himself back into the here and now once she had vanished from sight. And then he turned to Draco, who was still frozen in place as if he had just had an encounter with a basilisk – not of the horned desert variant.

"I'm sorry," Harry said pleasantly. "You were saying?"

And without waiting for any kind of response, he went his way as well.

~•~

Later that day, when the advancing afternoon hours were slowly blending into early evening, Hermione, after finishing her last class of the day, was leaving the castle through the great two-winged main gate on her way to Hagrid's hut to help her half-giant friend with a few much needed finishing touches on his _lettre d'amour_.

While not quite as sunny as the days before, the weather was still far enough from being considered unpleasant by any but the most sensitive kind. In fact Hermione welcomed the fresh breeze that was gently swirling around her skin and playfully blowing through her loose hair, and after leaving the warm halls of the castle found the fresh air, both on her skin and in her lungs, to be quite invigorating. For now at least, for she simultaneously anticipated the fleeting nature of the feeling and fully expected to be freezing by the time she would reach the incomparably quirky, modest little hut traditionally inhabited by Hogwarts' groundskeeper, that did, however, as Hermione had read in _Hogwarts: A History_, change its appearance with every individual that assumed the responsibility, and it was hard to imagine how it could look any different while it was home to Rubeus Hagrid.

Taking in the scenery – the lush meadows; the edge of the thick forest not far behind where Hagrid's hut could be seen, that forbidden as it was still looked like a pretty average forest from the outside; the gentle slopes and hills that rose to mountains in the distance and surrounded the placid lake that the castle towered above – and relishing every deep breath she took, she felt as much at ease as she rarely had over the course of this week that so unexpectedly had turned out to be characterized mostly by interpersonal nervousness and awkwardness, and even more so by unfamiliarly turbulent emotions and conflicting thoughts.

New discoveries were usually something Hermione was naturally excited about, but in this case, when she found herself to be the very subject of said discoveries, she couldn't help but feel more than a little anxious. Introspective endeavors are certainly a worthwhile effort, but it's always a dangerous thing to find yourself at both ends of the microscope, for whatever you might find you will not be able to turn away from so easily.

It was with such thoughts that Hermione finally arrived at the rickety fence that surrounded both the hut and the multitude of patches of all kinds of plants and vegetables surrounding it; a thick cluster of rampantly growing pumpkins included. Hermione made a mental check mark behind at least this one point on their extensive Halloween agenda. Hagrid might not have been the best person to entrust with the combination to your personal safe, but you could always rely on him for loyalty, companionship and the annual batch of giant pumpkins.

Shivering only slightly, Hermione stepped up to the strangely slanting door that always seemed less askew once you realized there were no two lines anywhere in or around Hagrid's hut that were perfectly aligned. Not even on a pencil. For Hermione it was now time to push away the thoughts about one particular person that insisted so vehemently on going bonkers in her mind, so that she could concentrate on the task at hand. She took pride in the ability to give her undivided attention to any task or person that required it. Lately, however, she had found that ability to be somewhat impaired.

Now that she thought about it, it actually made her a little miffed. It shouldn't be impossible to make that ridiculously short stroll from the castle to Hagrid's place without thinking about, well, all that blasted stuff that was going on. That was not the kind of person she was. She didn't get caught up in petty personal affairs and narcissistic self-pity. Well, except when she did. But only very rarely and always in full awareness of her own irrelevance.

Irrelevance can be quite magnificent a thing, though – in a certain sense. Some of the things most insignificant in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, like really the sum of all human affairs, can turn out to be the most wondrous, the most inspiring experience of your life; at least within the fleeting blink of an eye they so magically happen. Something can suddenly and unexpectedly be the one thing that defines the very entirety of the cosmos itself for you, and bring the whole elusively palpable essence of everything and nothing unified as one right into the radiant center of your delirious heart.

Like an innocent kiss on the cheek that seems to tell you everything you could have ever hoped to know, and yet at the same time nothing at all. One answer, a multitude of questions.

_What are you doing to me, Harry?_

"Hermione!"

She jumped, and confounded she became aware of the opened door and the green-eyed person standing right in front of her with a rather surprised expression of his own, looking down at her as she was apparently still standing on the doorstep, and had been doing so for Merlin knows how long.

"Hi," she threw the first two letters off her lips that got there and that luckily made up an actual word. "I, uh, didn't expect to find you here."

"Meaning that you either deliberately looked for me in a place you didn't expect to find me," he jocularly said, "or didn't look for me at all. Which would make me either befuddled or disappointed."

"Can I say it was neither of those?" she asked somewhat sheepishly.

"Uncharacteristically illogical," he replied with a lopsided smile, "but deemed to be acceptable."

"Well," she said, not any less flustered after that, "I actually came here to help Hagrid finish his letter."

"Sure. He told me about it," Harry revealed. "I just thought I'd pay him a visit myself, you know? Had a little chat, is all."

Then he looked at her expectantly and Hermione nervously switched her eyes from left to right and back again.

"You wanna step inside, perhaps?" Harry then asked amusedly, holding the door open for her.

"Oh," said Hermione. "Right."

And then, moving past Harry negligibly clumsier than she would have hoped, she stepped inside and noticed Hagrid sitting at the kitchen table, looking at her with an annoyingly amused expression somewhere between his enormous beard and his wild mane of coarse hair. A good thing then that at least everyone around her seemed so amused for some reason.

"I'll be off then and let you guys get to work," said Harry pleasantly, and then, with a last glance and a wink at Hermione, added, "Au revoir!" and with that stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

Hermione sat down across from Hagrid with a sigh, letting her school bag slide to the floor next to her chair and, in one fluent motion, ending up with her head buried in her crossed arms.

"Nice t'see yeh too, 'mione," she heard Hagrid say good-naturedly.

With another sigh and her voice muffled Hermione answered, "Please tell me your letter is coming along better than my life."

"Well," said he with a deep chuckle, "if yer life's bad as me letter, I reckon we shoul' work on that first. C'mon, lemme pour yeh some tea, 's jus' done."

Raising her head and stretching out her arms on the table with strands of hair hanging into her face she feebly said, "Tea would be nice."

"Here yeh go," Hagrid heartily said, handing her a white porcelain cup that looked ridiculously fragile in his huge hands and was, as usual, filled to the brim. "That'll work some magic on yeh."

"Wait," Hermione hesitantly said when she held the cup halfway to her lips, "you haven't put any whiskey or anything like that in here, have you?"

"Wha'? Who d'yeh take m'for, Hermione?" Hagrid asked, downright appalled at the insinuation. "It's not even… oh," he said, surprised when he threw a quick glance at the completely lopsided clock above the dented kitchen sink. "It's past four a'ready? Well, then I might as well get the day started an' help me t'summin' good."

"Rubeus Hagrid," Hermione warned him sternly, "if you start downing the booze on me now, I will not be working with you. You are insufferable when you're drunk, and you get drunk disturbingly fast."

"I am?" he asked, a little taken aback. "Insufferable, yeh say? That's a mighty strong word."

"No reason to take it personal," she assured him with a pat on his enormous arm. "Everyone is insufferable when drunk, at least to those who are not."

"I sure have a bottle for yeh too, if that's the problem," Hagrid said maybe half in jest, but he was quick to laugh when Hermione glared at him.

"Just show me the damn letter already," she told him with a smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

With some reluctance Hagrid handed over the piece of parchment and waited anxiously for Hermione to read it, fidgeting around with his fingers and chewing his lower lip. When she was finished a whole four seconds later, she looked up at him in disbelief.

"Seriously?" she asked. "That's it?"

"Well, uh," Hagrid hemmed and hawed abashedly, "It's an awfully difficult language, 's what it is. Wouldn' it be easier if yeh were ter just write the whole thing yerself instead?"

Hermione pursed her lips in a look of disapproval. "Yes, it would be easier. Especially for you. And it would also be completely wrong."

"But if's jus' this once maybe—"

"No," Hermione decisively cut him off. "If you can't even write the woman you profess to love a bloody letter, you are no better than one of those pop stars who can't even write their own songs, let alone sing them properly. If you can't do something, that's fine. Just don't do it then. Find something else to do. But don't let somebody else do the work for you while you take the credit. Especially in these matters it's just plain dishonest and manipulative."

"When yeh say't like that, I guess…"

"Honestly, Hagrid," she said, her voice a little softer again. "It's not that hard, and I'm here to help you. Why don't you just write down what you want to tell her in English and then we'll translate it."

"Huh," said Hagrid. "Don't sound like such a bad idea, but then again… I guess words jus' aren't one of me strengths no matter the language, yeh know?"

"Well, it's not like you have to pull off a Byron here."

"A what now?"

"Lord Byron? The poet?"

"Was he a wizard?"

"Of sorts, but not in the literal sense," Hermione answered, unintentionally increasing Hagrid's obvious confusion even further. "What I mean to say is… just be yourself. Write the words you wish to tell her. Words might not be your strength, but your heart is. You just have to listen to it, as mawkish as that may sound."

Hagrid thought about that for a moment and skeptically looked at the parchment and the quill he had put onto the table in preparation.

"An' what if all I can hear 's the beatin'?" he asked full of doubt. "Of me heart, I mean."

Hermione smiled the warmest of smiles at him. "Then it will at the very least tell you _I am, I am, I am_ – and then you just write her about that."

Clearly unsure of what to make of that, Hagrid got to work nevertheless, and Hermione pulled a few things out of her school bag and neatly spread them on the table around her.

"You take your time," she told him. "I'll just get some homework done in the meantime."

"Yeh sure?" he asked. "'cause yeh really don't need t'stay here and wait fo' me t'get summin' done."

"It's perfectly fine," she told him sincerely. "With the way things are going, this is actually one of the last spots of peace left to me around here. Besides, your company is not something I shun. At least as long as you're sober."

"Are them kids still givin' yeh a hard time with all 'em rumors?" Hagrid asked caringly. "Yeh jus' have t'gimme their names, yeh know?"

She gave him an appreciating smile, then sighed weakly. "I seriously doubt you would want to see that list."

"That bad?" he asked grimly. "Kids these days, I'm tellin' yeh."

"Were they any nicer back in your day?" she asked him, thinking of his very particular situation.

"Well, not really," he conceded. "But nowadays they know so many foul words at such a young age a'ready that yeh kinda wanna cover yer own ears as an adult."

"The words might have changed," said Hermione, "but the conventions have not. Not even the perception of gender roles has, I'm afraid."

"How d'yeh mean?"

"Well, as it turns out," Hermione began to explain, "the way I see it, all the rumors, as diverse as they are, really come down to one basic consensus. Harry, they think, can apparate into the beds of all the girls in the castle, in some versions of the tale even all the women in the world, and I am one of those who have willingly granted him entrance. So, naturally, Harry is a hero and I'm a slut."

Hagrid stared at her with his eyes wide and his mouth agape in an expression that could not have been more shocked. Then, after a second or two, the quill between his thumb and index finger broke with a _crack!_ and then hung loosely from his hand, to which he reacted in no perceivable fashion.

"That's bloody outrageous!" he suddenly bellowed in a furious outbreak, banging his white-knuckled fist on the table and sending the feathered end of the quill wildly swirling through the air. "Rubbish! Utter rubbish!"

"Relax, Hagrid," Hermione immediately tried to soothe him, holding on to her books and parchments that had all made a jump at the impact of his fist on the wobbly table. "Of course it's rubbish. That's why it's comparatively easy to laugh off."

"Compared ter wha'?" asked Hagrid, angrily eyeing the fluttering piece of his quill that ultimately dropped to the floor.

"Well, no matter how ludicrous and juvenile the things people say might be," she answered, "they are always easier shrugged off from a safe distance and much harder to take when you hear them with your own ears, or when they are even thrown directly at you."

When she noticed the signs of another fit of rage on Hagrid, she quickly added, "But when you end up getting kissed it's not all that bad."

Hagrid looked positively flummoxed at that. "Wha' kind o' nutter would first insult somebody an' then kiss 'em?"

For the fracture of a second Hermione, who had drifted off a little in her thoughts, was almost as confused as the half-giant. "What? No! No, it was Harry."

"Harry insulted yeh?" Hagrid practically shouted, all but deranged by now.

"No, of course not! He's the one who gave me a kiss after somebody else insulted… well, actually the both of us."

"Oh," Hagrid meekly mumbled into his beard, instantly calmed and additionally embarrassed. "That, uh, that makes more sense, I s'pose."

"You think?" Hermione asked in mock seriousness, smiling and shaking her head at the whole silliness of their dialogue.

For a moment they were quiet, and both of them took a sip or two of their tea to calm their nerves.

"So Harry kissed yeh, eh?"

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Just on the cheek, Hagrid. Nothing to get all curious about."

"But 'twas a special kind o' situation, if I take yer meanin' right."

She sighed and took another sip, relishing the warmth spreading through her body. "Malfoy insulted the both of us with one of his typical, repulsive remarks and yes, he once more referred to me as a Mudblood – bring on the Dementors, yada yada, calm down, Hagrid – and then Harry was just about to attack him—"

"Did he get that slimy git good an' proper?

"No, because I held him back, and something much better happened."

"A dragon came an' ate Malfoy whole?"

"Almost," she said, giving him a smile. "No, we just talked."

Hagrid looked at her in confusion, and also in anticipation of much needed clarification.

"We pretty much ignored Malfoy, and to be perfectly honest I don't even recall what he looked like or if he was even there anymore when I left. But I guess that's the beauty of it. I didn't even care."

"Because o' the kiss?" asked Hagrid, wiggling his bushy eyebrows suggestively at her.

She rolled her eyes again and involuntarily tried to hide herself behind her cup a little more. "Partly," she said. Then, with a sigh, she added, "But I really don't want to overrate it, you know? Where its meaning is concerned. It was a nice gesture, that's all."

"An' yeh really believe that?"

When Hermione merely threw him a quick glance and didn't give any indication she would actually answer his question, he sunk back into his chair and exhaled a heavy sigh that might just have sufficed to push a little sailing boat across the whole length of the lake.

"I jus' don't know wha' it is about the two o' you," he said, and to Hermione's puzzlement he somehow sounded sad. "Have yeh at least talked t'somebody about any o' this? It's clearly eatin' away at yeh."

"Well, you know me," she answered. "I don't open up to just anyone, even if that might damage my newfound reputation as a slut."

"Hermione!" Hagrid breathed, scandalized by all the ambiguity.

"I'm kidding," she was quick to assure him. "I did actually try to talk to Luna, who's really the only girl in school and in my age that I would consider a friend, but… well, Luna is Luna. When I told her yesterday that Harry had woken up in my bed, all she said was, 'Finally,' and then she went chasing after a butterfly that, as I might add, was at least real for a change."

With a chuckle Hagrid commented, "Still, the girl might be on ter summin' there."

"Care to elaborate?" Hermione asked in between sips.

"Well, yeh have ter admit," Hagrid reluctantly went on, fidgeting around with the pitiful stub that was left of his quill, "yeh and Harry, the both of yeh… well, yer really are quite summin', don't yeh think?"

Hermione took an especially deliberate sip of tea before asking, "Meaning what, exactly?"

Hagrid shifted nervously in his chair, which appeared to put said creaking chair's stability to a real test.

"Meet me halfway here, will yeh?" he well-nigh pleaded. "Now I'm the first t'say yer the brightest witch o' yer age, and I guess that's why I really don't get why yeh have such a hard time gettin' yer head 'round this one."

"Around what?" Hermione innocently asked, refilling her cup with some more tea.

"Yer awfully good at evadin' the whole topic, I'll give yeh that."

"Well, I'm listening," she replied. "I'm just not sure I want to add my commentary."

"I guess that's fine by me," said Hagrid. "So maybe I'll jus' say this one more thing, an' then we'll let it rest an' get back t'work, wha' d'yeh say?"

"Sounds good to me," she said. "Go ahead then. It is without irony when I say that I am in desperate need for some enlightenment this week."

Hagrid emptied his cup of tea with one last, big gulp and then put the cup back down onto the table with what for him qualified as great care, which made Hermione wonder if the porcelain was actually enchanted to prevent it from breaking. Surely it had to be, for how many cups would he otherwise be wasting every week? When Hagrid finally began to speak, Hermione shook herself from this rather weird trail of thought and focused all her attention back on him.

"I'm not sure I can be much o' help with that, but I'll say wha' I wanna get said anyway. Now, this might be jus' me own opinion, nothin' more. Don't has ter be right or anythin'. But I'm not sure if yer aware or not how most people have been 'xpectin' summin' ter happen between the two o' yeh for I don't even know how long, yeh know? Jus' a general feelin', I s'pose, since yeh two have been t'gether all this time. I guess most people a'ways suspect summin' when there's a boy an' a girl close as yeh two. Now I don't claim ter be an expert on any o' this, but I do think there's not many boys 'an girls who are t'gether the way the two o' yeh are without, yeh know, bein' _t'gether_, if yeh take me meanin'.

"I'm sure yeh know 'bout the Daily Prophet an' its silly column 'bout Harry's personal affairs, an' I'm the first t'curse them nosey reporters an' their meddlin' an' their gossipin', as if Harry didn't a'ready have enough trouble as 'tis. But whenever they stop writin' nonsense 'bout some girls I've ne'er even heard of who are s'posedly involved with Harry, an' they come back ter wha' they a'ways come back ter eventually, which is Harry and his best female friend – an' by that I mean me 'mione – well, then I jus' can't help but think to meself that summin' 'bout it jus' sounds right, yeh know? An' that's rare fer the Prophet.

"Maybe it's jus' me. I can't even really 'xplain it an' I don't know if that's 'cause I'm not much good with words or maybe 'cause I'm jus' plain wrong. I don't know. But wha' I really wanna say is this, and this is wha' I jus' wanna ter tell yeh. I don't claim ter un'erstand wha' it is with the two o' yeh and wha's goin' on between yeh, but what I do know is that… ter tell yeh the truth, and I've been thinkin' this fer quite a while now, Hermione, I jus' wouldn't wanna be the poor bloke in yer life who's gotta compete with Harry."

~•~

Sometimes, on days like these, Hermione wondered why she had ever willingly taken on the responsibility as Head Girl. Normally she only wondered how she could ever have received enough votes to be even considered for the position, since she didn't exactly perceive herself as either popular or very socially competent, but today? Today she could only shake her head about her marginally younger self that, a few weeks ago, had been so excited when she had received the letter that officially offered her the position and informed her that she had won both the prefects' and the staff's votes.

When they had finally gone through all fifty-eight points they had set out to discuss during their meeting, the clock had read five past ten. The prefects had been free to leave at that point, with Ron already halfway through the door while Hermione had still been in the process of dismissing them, but she and Declan MacManus, the Head Boy from Ravenclaw, had stayed behind to get everything that had just been discussed in order and work on a timetable for the Halloween event itself. Oddly enough, Declan's girlfriend Siobhan, a prefect herself, had also stayed with them, and Hermione would've actually welcomed the additional help if only the pretty blonde would have refrained from constantly eyeing her with the most irritating suspicion.

Well, at least the _rumors_ hadn't come up tonight, or at least not within her earshot, which was definitely worth something. It didn't change anything about how utterly exhausted she felt, though, and as she weakly dragged herself up the stairs of Gryffindor Tower with most of the portraits on the walls either empty or inhabited by softly snoring witches and wizards – and some house-elves –, she couldn't help but think what a lousy and, quite frankly, crazy day it had been. _"For the most part, that is,"_ she thought to herself while her fingers involuntarily brushed lightly against the skin of one particular spot on her cheek. Then she suddenly got aware of the Fat Lady, who was looking at her with one quizzical eyebrow perked straight up.

Hermione awkwardly cleared her throat as she hastily dropped her hand back to her side. "_Sapere aude_," she mumbled, and evidently that was good enough for the Lady, as she granted her entrance with her portrait softly swinging backwards and making a noise that sounded an awful lot like _uh-huh_.

Stifling a yawn Hermione stepped through the portrait hole and into the common room, where only a handful of students from sixth and seventh year were left, chatting animatedly on the far side of the room under the open windows. One or two of them raised their hands or gave a nod in greeting when they saw her, but went back to their conversations just as quickly as Hermione's eyes wandered on to scan the room for others that might still be here. And sure enough, one more she found.

She approached him slowly, watching his profile intently as he sat there in his favorite spot in the room; the fireside armchair. His legs were outstretched before him, resting on a footstool made of the same leather as the chair itself. His hands were lying in his lap, loosely holding on to an open book, while his head was marginally sunken forward and slightly tilted towards his shoulder. As she stepped ever nearer, she saw that his eyes were closed and his features relaxed in a face aglow with fiery shades of red and orange.

With a few last steps, muffled on the carpet, she came to a halt with her back to the fire, and tilting her head to align it with Harry's she silently watched him for a moment. There was no sight in the world that could ever have the same comforting and soothing effect on her as seeing Harry so peaceful, so perfectly at ease, for in a world that allowed even a young boy as burdened and stricken as him to find some peace, not all could yet be lost.

"Call me paranoid, but I feel like I'm being watched right now."

The only consolation Hermione found in that moment was that, with the fire as the brightest source of light behind her, no one should really be able to see the tinge of red that was sure to creep onto her cheeks within an instant. And then, suddenly, his eyes were looking right at her.

"Not so paranoid after all," he said with a smile.

"Well, I really just arrived," Hermione stammered an excuse that even to herself seemed pathetically flimsy. Crossing her arms in front of her chest she eyed him suspiciously. "Were you peeking?"

"I didn't need to," he replied, shrugging his shoulders and putting a bookmark between the pages before gently closing the book. "I heard you."

"But I didn't make any noise," she insisted.

"Your walk."

"My walk?"

"I heard you walk."

"But that could have been anyone."

"No. Only you walk like that."

"What?" she asked with a hint of indignation in her voice. "Are you saying I have a funny walk?"

"Not funny," he answered, entirely unruffled. "Just yours. Besides, who else would approach me like that? And we practically had a date, remember?"

"Oh? A date?" While genuinely surprised, she nevertheless overplayed it just a little. "Is that what we are calling it?"

"Well," he said, putting his feet back on the ground and straightening himself up, "just a little one. A time, a place and no occasion but you and me."

Without consciously meaning to she averted her eyes, and while wanting to, she found herself unable to say anything.

"What time is it, anyway?" she heard Harry ask, his nonchalance sounding just a little put on.

With a glance at her watch she told him, "Just after eleven," and then, when she raised her head and saw how tired he looked, asked, "How long have you been waiting here?"

"Forget about it," he dismissed it. "I had a quiet, comfortable evening with a good book my favorite girl gave to me. Said girl on the other hand looks completely exhausted."

"Well," she said, nodding in dramatic dismay, "party planning is one tough business. We lost a lot of good men and women out there."

"Damn," said Harry gloomily, shaking his head. "I was wondering where Ron was."

Hermione snorted, thereby effectively ruining their little play. "The ruddy bloke was the first one out of there as soon as I spoke the words _well then_."

He chuckled quietly, and when he involuntarily turned around and noticed that the small group of students was collectively staring at them from across the room, he cleared his throat and turned back to Hermione.

"Maybe we should cut this short and get some sleep, huh?"

Hermione nodded slowly, visibly tired. Then her eyes suddenly flew wide open. "Wait," she said with newfound energy, "what about your visit to the infirmary? What happened?"

"Oh, that," he said, yawning behind his hand. "Right, I completely forgot about that."

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at him.

"Honestly, it was nothing groundbreaking," he assured her, his sincerity only surpassed by his sleepiness that made him slur just a bit. "It was just Pomfrey and Flitwick this time around. They talked about the bracelet and brain activity… and magical currents and energy levels… and a whole lot of stuff. Said they don't yet fully understand it, which is really what it all came down to. Again. Maybe you should have been there. It was pretty technical, really. Flitwick kept saying that something's missing, and he also said he improved something about the barriers around the dormitories with the help of Dobby. You know, because my teleportation stunts are magically more akin to what our little green friends do all the time, and all that. So in the end we decided I would not be taking the Nonsomnium potion again, and instead see if these modified barriers do their job. Maybe Hogwarts' female populace can sleep more easily again, knowing that they are once again safe from the school's most lecherous inhabitant."

Hermione listened to every word he slurred with all the concentration she could still muster in her current state, yet she nonetheless had a harder time than usual to at least pick out what seemed to be the most important pieces of information, let alone make sense of everything he had just told her as a whole. That would evidently have to wait until tomorrow.

"Okay," she slowly said. "I guess we really should go to bed and maybe talk about this when we are both in a clearer state of mind."

"Agreed," he agreed. "I don't think I'd be able to even begin to comprehend the innumerable intricacies of party planning right now."

Hermione stuck out her tongue at him. "As long as you can still say _innumerable intricacies_, it can't be that bad."

"Oh!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Now I nearly forgot this." And out of his pocket he pulled a bracelet that looked identical to the one he had been wearing the last couple of nights. Hermione eyed it warily, eliciting a chuckle from Harry when he saw her expression.

"Yeah, you get one too now," he said, gloating just a little. "Relax. We'll just be bracelet buddies. It's not like we're married with these."

Hesitantly she reached out and took the thing from Harry, regarding it with no small amount of suspicion. "Well," she said, "I should hope you'd get us something a little more tasteful than what pretty much comes down to a rubber band as a symbolic representation for our marriage." Then she paused a second and, without looking up, quickly added, "Hypothetically speaking, of course."

Smiling he said, "Come on now," and made a step towards her and took her by the hand. Then he gently pulled her after him and she followed, puzzled as she was.

"What are you doing, Harry?" she asked him when he began ascending the stairs to the girls' dormitories.

"Oh, right," he said as he turned around with one of his disarming, lopsided smiles, obviously fooling around. "I forgot that we don't _go_ to bed together, but only _end up_ there next to teach other."

She rolled her eyes at him, even while her lips turned into a smile of their own.

"Not anymore," she then said, looking up at him and unable to make out the finer details of his features, with only the faint light of the fireplace illuminating them weakly.

"Right," Harry quietly conceded. "Not anymore."

Hermione felt herself gulp, and trying hard not to choke on her words she said as casually as possible, "Well, at least I can wish you sweet dreams tonight."

"Right," he said again, though this one sounded much happier than the first. Then, with a roguish smile, he added, "I guess I could think of a sweet thing to dream of."

Ignoring the heat that rose to her head following that ambiguous and yet oddly unmistakable remark, she replied, "I'm sure Malfoy would appreciate it."

"Uhm, ew?" Harry complained, his face contorted with disgust. "Seriously, if my next dream sucks I'll blame you."

She uttered a weak sigh, still smiling while shaking her head for some secret reason. Finally, reluctantly she let go of his hand and moved past him until she stood a few steps above. Then she turned around again.

"Good night, Harry."

"Yeah, well," he replied with his hands in the pockets of his pants, "maybe I'll see you later tonight."

"Maybe," she said, and with that walked up the stairs, wondering if Harry was still standing below and watching her, but never turning around to find out.

~•~

The first thing he was aware of was a strange sensation, and a feeling hard to make sense of. Maybe this was one of those dreams in which you just die in the strangest of ways? In this case it could be that he was buried alive, or just hopelessly lost under something heavy. If he was buried, he didn't seem to be in a coffin, for there didn't seem to be much air around him. Instead, he had no doubt, he felt the weight directly pushing down on him, especially on his chest.

On second thought, however, it didn't appear to be all that heavy. There was something going around him as well, both on his upper body as well as his legs. Maybe he was tied up? Was he reliving the nightmarish experience of being swallowed and suffocated by the Devil's Snare? Somehow that didn't seem right, for he remembered quite clearly how that had felt, and it had been far worse than whatever this was.

Now that he thought about it, it didn't even feel particularly bad. A little unfamiliar, for sure, but not uncomfortable. There was weight on him, yes, but it wasn't all that heavy and it didn't seem to move much of its own. It rather moved with him, with the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest; up and down and up again. It was always there, it didn't change. And it felt warm, but not like a blanket, but like something that has warmth of its own.

And now that he thought about how he was thinking about all of this, he couldn't help but think that it was strange that his dream seemed to primarily consist of thinking a great deal about stuff he didn't know exactly what to think of. Was it just dark in here, or were his eyes closed? Maybe he could try opening them. Their lids felt heavy, and a first attempt went nowhere. With the second they flickered open for the fracture of a second, but then fell shut again just as quickly. Only with a third, forceful push did he finally get them open, and then he immediately went on to blink rapidly.

Then he suddenly knew that he was awake, and without consciously meaning to his body shifted with the recognition of the unfamiliar feeling of being beneath something heavier than his blanket, which in turn made that something shift as well – and that was confusing the hell out of him for a moment. He tried to raise his head a little so that he could look down at himself, but all he could make out in the faint light and with sleep still blurring his vision was… well, something that made it impossible to see anything at all, really. Then it shifted again and what had previously been very dark and shapeless became something brighter, warmer and much sharper defined.

Finally his brain accomplished something useful, and at once his lips turned into a contented smile.

"Told you so," he said with unconcealed delight.

"Hmmm?" she blearily moaned, looking around through her curls in utter disorientation with her head hovering just an inch above his chest. And then her sleepy eyes widened. "Oh!"

His smile spread. "Happy birthday, by the way."

"What?" she asked, still more than just a little muddled. "Oh, right! It's Friday, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"Huh," she said, and he couldn't quite stifle a chuckle that forced its way over his lips. "And what's so funny to you, mister?"

He shrugged his shoulders innocently. "I suppose it's just a little funny that it happened again, and that whatever they did to prevent it evidently didn't work."

She looked at him for a moment, then she slowly turned her head to the left and said, "Well," and her head turned to the right, "technically it did."

And then she turned her head back to him, and he looked at her with his eyebrows raised in an expression of amusement joined by puzzlement. When she looked right back expectantly, he merely switched his eyes from side to side, utterly clueless.

With a little sigh she said, "This is _your_ bed, Harry."

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_10 Things I Hate About You:_ The last exchange between Harry and Ron on their way to their private Quidditch practice session is very much based on a similar scene in the 1999 movie _10 Things I Hate About You_. "We're screwed!"

_The Bell Jar: _When Hermione tells Hagrid what his heart will always reliably tell him, she is alluding to this line from Sylvia Plath's only novel, _The Bell Jar, _1963: "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."

Something to remember in moments when all else fails.

_Sapere aude:_ Originally from Horace's _Epistles_ and generally translated as "Dare to know" or "Dare to be wise", it's best known from Immanuel Kant's essay "_What Is Enlightenment?" _wherein he describes it as having the courage to make use of one's own mind.

Now, going with the cliché this might be best suited for Ravenclaw as a password, but then again, it _is_ about the bravery and courage that knowledge demands of those who seek it. And it _has_ something to do with stuff in this story. Just saying.

Also, fun fact: In English people always make an effort to pronounce the Name _Kant_ with a drawn-out 'Ah' so as to make it sound less like a certain other word in the English language that no one is all that eager to constantly utter in a philosophical discussion. The correct German pronunciation, however, is very much identical with that _other_ word.

_Bracelet buddies:_ Another reference to the sitcom that was simply better than having to witness how Ted Mosby tells his poor children just how many women he dated before finally knocking up their mom. I wouldn't want to be those kids' therapist.

I am, of course, talking about _Friends_; Season 2, Episode 14.


	7. Affinity

**Author's Note:** In this seventh chapter it's going to get technical one last time; comparable but certainly not identical to Chapter V. If up until now Harry and Hermione have stumbled upon a hint or two, this is the part where they get hit by the metaphorical sledgehammer. But getting knocked out is usually not the final step towards enlightenment, and so the upcoming two chapters will revolve around whatever our two bewitched, bothered and bewildered protagonists end up doing with all that has happened over the course of the week and any newfound knowledge they might or might not have gained.

Maybe Harry will choose to join a monastery while Hermione ends up in a convent. Maybe they'll get abducted by aliens. Or maybe this has all just been a dream of Dudley Dursley all along.

Infinite possibilities…

Also, as one uncompromising reader pointed out, I completely forgot to mention Anthony Goldstein, the most important character ever. Consider me appropriately ashamed. Instead I irreverently made up one Declan MacManus – whose last name was meant as a little allusion to the 1999 film _The Boondock Saints;_ thereby effectively committing the worst kind of iconoclasm. I offer my sincerest apologies not only to the fictitious Padma Patil for not explicitly making her the Ravenclaw prefect she clearly deserves to be for all the great things we all know she has done, but first and foremost to both Mr. Goldstein and his family, as well as his innumerable fans and admirers. He will not be forgotten. Again.

Wait, who were we talking about? Jeff Goldblum? I always liked that guy.

* * *

**• Chapter VII •**

**Affinity**

At least it wasn't the middle of the night again. No one was half-naked and in fact they were all very properly clothed, well-groomed for the most part – someone's hair always insisting on being the exception – and certainly looking a little less sleep-deprived overall. No candles were burning and the room was instead brightly lit by low, early morning sunrays falling through the two high windows behind the desk. One of the windows stood slightly ajar, letting a fresh yet gentle breeze inside; the temperature all around still pleasant enough. Looking only at the room itself and not the persons occupying it in that moment, an outside observer might have inferred that this was a room that would be perfectly nice to be in. And that was really all the good one could reasonably say about the situation.

Harry and Hermione sat in what quickly seemed to become their usual chairs, with Hermione – from their perspective – sitting in the left one and Harry to her right; about a meter apart. While fully clothed and in no need of blankets this time around, neither of them looked any less uncomfortable than during their last visit. Both of them sat with no small deal of tension; straight and stiff. Hermione held her folded hands in her lap while Harry had his on the armrest. While Hermione firmly bit her lower lip – sometimes chewing a little on it, sometimes not – Harry seemed to be poking about his teeth and the insides of his cheeks with his tongue, presumably for no other reason than the complete lack of any alternative things to do.

And then, of course, there was Professor McGonagall; sitting across from them in her red armchair behind her ever-tidy desk. Her glasses were, as was seldom seen, not on her nose for once, but lying on the desktop in front of her. She herself had both her elbows on the table, with one hand reaching up to support her bowed head; slowly rubbing her temples with thumb and middle finger in ongoing circles. If she held her eyes closed or not the two younger ones could not see, but they had altogether stopped looking expectantly at the professor a minute or two ago, and then they had stopped looking helplessly and unsurely at each other a little after that and had finally settled for staring blankly at random points of their individual choice.

It so appeared as if not even the fact that this time around Harry and Hermione had come to her willingly, instead of her practically dragging them here, did anything to improve the poor professor's condition.

Both their minds, independently of each other, wandered back to the early morning hours when once more they had awoken together, albeit under slightly changed circumstances. They had both been so tired that they had decided to just fall asleep again right there and then, or – to be more precise – had been far too tired and comfortable to consciously decide against it before slowly drifting off to sleep again, and they had agreed they would inform the Head of House Gryffindor about these newest turns of events first thing in the morning. And while indeed they had done just that and gone straight to her personal study even before breakfast, sneakily leaving the dorm room before all the others woke up, right now neither of them was entirely sure that it had been the best of ideas.

For what seemed to be a long time, even though no more than two minutes passed, it was so quiet in the room that the only constant sounds to be heard came from outside; the soft sighing of the wind and the gentle rustling of leaves it so playfully swirled around, or the occasional chirp of a few birds saying their late farewells to their summer home. It was so quiet, however, that to no one inside anything seemed louder than their own breathing, and both Harry and Hermione were tensely trying not to make any unnecessary noise at all.

Then, when the weariest of sighs came from underneath Professor McGonagall's hand, Harry and Hermione simultaneously cringed in their seats and instantly looked back at the professor. For a few more seconds nothing seemed to happen after that, and Harry and Hermione shared another nervous look, abruptly turning their heads again when the professor suddenly spoke.

"Would anyone be so kind to reveal to me now that this has all been no more than a juvenile jest?" she asked without raising her head. "Please, I implore you. If you tell me now that you were merely trying to ruin my day for nothing but your own amusement, I promise I will not even subtract any points from Gryffindor. We will just forget about all of this and move on with our blissfully normal lives."

Again Harry and Hermione glanced at each other, by now more worried than confused.

"Are… are you serious, professor?" Harry asked unsurely.

Immediately McGonagall raised her head in one sharp motion, her arm dropping heavily onto the table.

"No, Mr. Potter, I am not," she answered cuttingly. "If I recall correctly I was tempted to believe in something solely for my own convenience on approximately three occasions over the course of my considerable lifespan, and this is not one of them."

Harry sank back into his chair and looked just a little smaller than before, while with an exasperated sigh the professor roughly grabbed her glasses and put them back onto her nose, then readjusted them a little with some more composed movements of her fingers. Then she looked at the two young adults in front of her in turn; the boy, the girl and then the boy again. Each of them gulped under her stern gaze – and yes, Harry did in fact gulp twice.

"What in Merlin's name am I ever going to do with the two of you?" McGonagall finally asked rather rhetorically, pensively shaking her head; her expression just a little softer than a moment earlier. "Isn't there anything you can do just like everybody else?"

"But nobody is teleporting into other people's beds," Hermione said to that, her eyebrows knitted in confusion.

McGonagall turned to her within an instant. "That is exactly my point, Miss Granger," she told her brusquely, then composed herself with a sharp sigh and continued in a steadier voice, "I think we can at the very least all agree that this has left the realms of the trivial far behind by now, and that something has to be done to get it under control as soon as possible."

When both her students merely lowered their heads abashedly and showed no intentions of adding their thoughts to that, the professor continued herself. "Now, I might not have any idea of how exactly to accomplish that without making a drug addict out of Mr. Potter," she said, "but I am intent on finding out. And sooner rather than later. Dobby?"

At that both Harry and Hermione raised their heads again, and even before they had done so the house-elf had already appeared right in front of them with the usual, soft cracking noise. With his back towards them and the desk right in front of him, Dobby looked a little lost for a moment.

"Dobby?" McGonagall asked again, a little confused herself.

"Yes, professor McGonagall," he squeaked, "Dobby is right down here."

"Oh," the professor said, leaning forward to have a look at him. "Well, would you please do me the favor to summon the professors Flitwick and Snape to the staff's conference chamber, as well as Madam Pomfrey?"

"The usual assemblage, Dobby sees," the house-elf assessed.

"Indeed," McGonagall affirmed with the tiniest of smiles playing around the corners of her lips. "You yourself would make a welcome addition once more as well."

"Dobby would be honored and will get to the task immediately," he said happily, vanishing into thin air right away.

"Well," said the professor, looking at her two uncharacteristically helpless students again, "I believe we have a meeting to attend."

"But professor," Hermione remarked, all but protesting, "classes will be beginning shortly."

"Oh, yes," McGonagall replied sarcastically, rising from her chair. "I can only imagine how hard a time our diligent students will have recovering from these unexpected free periods."

"But—"

"But me no buts, Miss Granger," the professor cut her off, already marching off towards the door. "Follow me!"

Harry and Hermione slowly turned and looked at each other, and then heaved two perfectly synchronized, long and most despondent sighs.

~•~

Less than five minutes later they stepped into the conference chamber behind Professor McGonagall and found only Dobby and Professor Flitwick were already there, while Madam Pomfrey entered the room from a door on the opposite site only seconds after them. In the middle of the room stood one long table, made of dark wood – although it would have been more precise so say that it hovered there, for it had no legs to speak of. From one side of the room, where there were five high arching windows with ceiling-high banners of the four houses and richly ornamented candles in between them, the grayish light of day flooded the room, the sun now hidden mostly behind clouds. Around the table stood many elegantly shaped chairs, as dark as the table – but, oddly enough, with actual legs. One of them, at the far end of the table and near the wall where an old but colorful tapestry showed the sigil of Hogwarts above a large fireplace, had a white seat. The four stairs nearest to it were the only ones with colored seats; red and yellow on one side of the table, green and blue on the other. All the remaining seats – more in number than there were teachers at Hogwarts – had black seats.

On one of them sat Dobby, barely able to look out over the table with his large round eyes, and next to him stood Professor Flitwick, reaching not much higher than Dobby even while standing. With Madam Pomfrey just arriving, everyone exchanged greetings and eyed Harry and Hermione with some suspicion, or, in the case of Flitwick, with elated interest.

"So," he pleasantly said, clapping his long hands together, "I believe we wouldn't be here if we didn't have any new developments to discuss?"

"Indeed," McGonagall answered with a look at Harry and Hermione, who gave the impression of two kids that were about to be reprimanded for eating too much candy. "New, for sure."

"Another teleportation?" Flitwick asked with unconcealed excitement, then turned to the two younger ones. "And you were both wearing your bracelets, I hope?"

Dutifully, if not without reluctance, both Harry and Hermione stripped their bracelets off their wrists and handed them to the professor, who took them eagerly.

"Splendid!" he said. "Splendid!"

Then he turned and stepped over to one of the chairs. "Of course I was half expecting and, to be quite frank, fully hoping for something like this, so I brought my little apparatus right with me," he said while tapping the chair with his wand, whereupon said chair shrunk to a third of its size. Then he easily stepped onto it, tapped it once more and thus brought it back to its original size with himself on top. Then he put a strangely shaped, utterly unidentifiable thing on the table that was small enough to be held in the palm of his hand and casually tapped that with the tip of his wand as well.

The thing immediately and drastically grew to twice and thrice the size of Professor Flitwick himself, and then still a little more, until it looked like half a laboratory consisting of a labyrinth of brass pipes and glass phials, levers and valves in different colors, coils and inductors with wires going hither and thither, ridiculous amounts of fittings, bins and tanks with a pair of scales in between, and a multitude of gauges and switches with numbers, Greek letters and strange symbols on them. From a miniature brick chimney somewhere near the top of the device – if it could even be called only one device – flimsy puffs of white smoke rose into the air.

In many other places this certainly might have qualified as a rather baffling sequence of events, but given this was Hogwarts no one in the room did even do so much as look twice. Except maybe for Dobby, but then again his eyes were physiognomically limited to look astounded.

"So, tell me more," Professor Flitwick said, all the while pressing buttons, flipping switches and turning wheels with quick fingers. "Was anything different?"

"You might say that," answered McGonagall stiffly. "It appears Mr. Potter and Miss Granger deemed it proper to mix things up a little. It was all becoming so mundane so fast, after all."

Flitwick threw them a glance and raised an eyebrow, saying, "Consider me intrigued."

"I never considered you anything but, Filius," McGonagall replied and then, with a motion of her hand, gave Harry to understand that he was very much invited to speak up.

"Well, uh," he began unsurely, but most of it somehow got stuck in his throat, which he then cleared accordingly before starting anew. "Well, there really isn't much to tell. It's just that this time we, uhm, we both woke up in my bed instead of… instead of hers. Big deal, right?"

The shrug Harry tried to give was quickly stifled when he saw the reactions around the room, with Dobby's eye somehow growing even wider and Madam Pomfrey burying her face in one of her hands. Even Professor Flitwick looked positively dumbfounded for a moment. Then, however, his expression turned into one of pure delight.

"This is even better than I thought!" he well-nigh exclaimed and then, turning back to his instruments, once more said, "Splendid!"

Just in that moment the door through which Madam Pomfrey had entered earlier, on the windowed side of the room, swung open once more and Snape entered with a few long strides, looking just about twice as liverish as Flitwick looked breezy.

"Severus," McGonagall greeted him with a deliberate look at her watch. "How nice of you to join us."

"Better three minutes too late than an hour too soon," Snape replied sullenly. "Some of us do have other things to do besides devoting their whole attention to Potter's amorous extravaganza. But please, by all means, involve me. What did I miss?"

"We were just informed that this time our two culprits woke up in Mr. Potter's bed instead of Miss Granger's," Madam Pomfrey explained to him without humor, ever lacking the appreciation for his antics.

Snape raised an eyebrow at that. "That might actually be deemed mildly unforeseen."

"Yes, yes," Professor Flitwick agreed excitedly. "It's quite fascinating."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Filius," Snape addressed the busy Head of House Ravenclaw, "but didn't you apply what were supposed to be _improvements_ to the magical barriers around the dormitories?"

Flitwick paused and scratched his nose, yet didn't turn away from his device. "Well," he hesitantly answered, "that wouldn't exactly be the most precise description of what I did."

More than one eyebrow around the room was raised in response to that.

"And what exactly _did_ you do, Filius?" McGonagall asked him with a warning undercurrent to her voice.

"Well," the small professor replied and finally turned around to face the group, looking quite ashamed, "I believe the term most commonly used in colloquial English would be… nothing."

A few chins might have dropped half an inch at that as well.

"Nothing?" Professor McGonagall asked incredulously. "What is the meaning of this?"

"The meaning of this, it seems," Snape interposed with the hint of a smile playing around one corner of his mouth, "is that the line between Ravenclaw and Slytherin can be a thin and oftentimes blurry one." Then he addressed Flitwick personally, "How unexpectedly deceptive, Filius. I applaud you."

The compliment's recipient looked embarrassed. "Deception is such a strong word," he said meekly. "I'd much prefer to just call it a psychological placebo, if that's alright."

Glancing around the room he found that no one besides Snape looked too appreciatively back at him.

"I apologize," he said with a slight inclination of his head. "It was not my intention to insult, disregard or even deceive anyone. I merely thought the aforementioned placebo effect might be of use in our endeavor to better understand this. Having Mr. Potter and Miss Granger believe that no more teleportations could take place was an important piece to my research, as it would have considerable influence on all those factors my bracelets are made to monitor. I _wanted_ another teleportation to happen, for we didn't have enough data to really understand any of this yet. I suppose I just forgot to involve my trusted colleagues in my little idea..."

"Of course!" Hermione suddenly exclaimed, startling nearly everyone and poor Dobby twice as much as everybody else. "Why would you give us the bracelets if you believed the barriers would finally serve to prevent any teleportation from happening? Why didn't I think of that? I should at the very least have suspected something."

"Don't be too hard on yourself, Miss Granger," Professor McGonagall told her caringly. "I believe it's safe to say your mind has been somewhat preoccupied these days."

Even though her words were genuinely meant to reassure her student, they nevertheless served to make her blush and fall silent instead.

"Well," Snape drawled, "I'm sure we can all find it in ourselves to respect Professor Flitwick's scientifically motivated schemes and appreciate that they might have in fact served to yield some substantial progress. Something we have hitherto been in severe lack of, I might add."

McGonagall looked first at Snape, then – and with much more scrutiny – at Flitwick. After a moment's hesitation, with Professor Flitwick looking rather uncomfortable under her gaze, she said, "Fine. Then we'd better see some of that progress now."

"Of course, of course," Flitwick answered with rekindled enthusiasm. "Right away. I will proceed to read out the data from both bracelets individually now, and also observe any possible magical interconnection. It should be quite enlightening."

Even while speaking he began working on his _little_ apparatus; putting the two bracelets under separate bell jars on metal sockets, connecting cables, pulling levers. The device began buzzing and wheezing, crackling and puffing. Pipes vibrated, wires twitched and light bulbs flickered. The bell jars around the bracelets filled with dark smoke, and hundreds of flashes of lightning illuminated them in a bluish light; miniature thunderstorms in domes of glass.

Hermione, warily watching the whole procedure, leaned towards Harry and whispered, "I can't avoid feeling like that's my diary they are dissecting in there."

"Welcome to the club," Harry answered in an equally low voice. "Glad to have you onboard."

Professor Flitwick, staring through an eyepiece that observed Merlin knows what with his left eye while squinting the right one, let them know, "This will take just a little while to start making sense."

McGonagall, acknowledging the information with a nod, turned her attention to Harry and Hermione. "Any dreams last night?"

They both shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders.

"None I can remember," said Harry truthfully.

A pensive _hmmm_ came from Professor Flitwick, if in recognition of Harry's answer or in reaction to something he observed no one knew.

"Grab an eyepiece, Dobby," he then said, and the house-elf did so right away. Of course, an eyepiece that would actually fit onto one of Dobby's eyes would have to be enormous, so in this case he merely came very near to it and then squinted through it as good as he could, which – to be perfectly honest – looked rather hilarious. Then Flitwick said something about patterns and Dobby mumbled something in response. They seemed altogether engaged.

Snape gave off a sigh that sounded like a meeting of equal annoyance and boredom. "It's a good thing that nobody in this school of ours would have any other plans to speak of on an average Friday morning."

"This isn't exactly an average Friday morning by any means," mumbled Harry, which only Professor McGonagall connected to anything but the unusual circumstances of their gathering.

"Of course!" she practically exclaimed. "It's Miss Granger's birthday!"

"Oh, yes indeed," Snape commented flatly, then added with a smirk, "And it seems she already received her present as well. Congratulations truly are in order."

McGonagall, ignoring Snape's snide remark, apologized to Hermione with her cheeks flushed pink for not thinking of it any sooner and congratulated her cordially, and Madam Pomfrey followed suit while Flitwick and Dobby wished her semi-attentive _Happy Birthdays_ without looking up from their eyepieces.

Hermione smiled awkwardly, but thanked them nonetheless. "As I'm sure you can imagine this isn't exactly how I pictured spending my birthday. Not that I thought about it all that much, but this would certainly not have been part of any plans I could have possibly had."

"Sorry about that," Harry said meekly, giving her a timid smile with both his hands buried deep in the pockets of his pants.

Just when Hermione was about to say something in return Snape forestalled her by speaking up himself. "I cannot help but wonder if I should point out that as of today it is no longer a given that it is you alone, Potter, who has to apologize to Miss Granger."

"I'm not sure I understand," Harry replied with his eyebrows furrowed.

"Clearly," came the smug response from Snape. "I thought everyone was aware of the primary question these newest developments so overtly raise."

Apart from Flitwick and Dobby everyone in the room was giving his undivided attention to the Potions master by now, who usually tended to take a sort of distorted delight in such attention, yet in this moment merely seemed to be even more annoyed with the apparent lack of observational awareness of those around him, who seemed to be more occupied with birthdays and facile pleasantries.

"Well," he began to elaborate in his lecturing drawl and not without rolling his eyes excessively, "up until today all of us, to my personal satisfaction, presumed Potter to be the sole causal center of these life-enriching events. That presumption no longer holds up quite so easily, since it was Miss Granger who actually changed her location. So, either Mr. Potter has added the skill of teleporting the female populace into _his_ sleeping area to his already impressive portfolio, supposedly to make things even more convenient for himself, or Miss Granger is the one who pulled off a teleportation of her own."

General astonishment was the prevalent facial expression going around the room after that. Hermione looked outright horrified and stared blankly into some indefinable distance, her face for once bereft of all color. Harry, who very well might have felt as much off the hook as he ever had over the course of the week, still didn't look anything but embarrassed for some reason.

Hermione opened her mouth a few times in futile attempts to speak before at last she succeeded in ejecting a few syllables. "But that's… that's impossible," she stammered.

"_More_ impossible than remotely making someone else teleport?" Snape challenged her amusedly. "That's neither possible with Apparition nor with the similar skill house-elves utilize. I am _so sorry_ to be the one to disappoint, but right now it seems much more likely that you mirrored Potter's skills rather than him developing completely unprecedented ones himself."

"Seems like you keep joining my clubs today," Harry tried to salvage the situation, but Hermione merely switched her blank stare from that indefinable distance towards some not much more definable point in his face.

"Well," it then contemplatively came from Professor Flitwick, and everyone turned to look at the professor who was still not looking up from his eyepiece that by now was probably beginning to leave a permanent mark on his face, "I'm afraid to say that not only is Severus making perfect sense, but the data is also beginning to support his logical observation. At least to a certain degree."

"There are now degrees in this?" Madam Pomfrey asked, just a little despairingly.

"With increasing clarity," Flitwick went forth to explain, "things look like the answer lies somewhere in between. And quite literally so, I might add."

The confusion in the room was nearly tangible. Not quite literally, though.

"Would you like to share anything less vague with the rest of us?" Professor McGonagall asked a little impatiently. "Can you at least tell us who initiated the teleportation this time so at least we'll know what we are dealing with here?"

"Well," answered Flitwick slowly, "as it stands my answer to that would have to be… both."

No one knew what they were dealing with after that.

"Both?" McGonagall asked accordingly.

"Watch the sigma spectrum," Dobby told Professor Flitwick; the house-elf's enormous eyeball nearly touching the metal eyepiece.

"Hmmm, yes," the professor mused. "Yes, indeed."

The sigma spectrum apparently had a very revealing quality about it. Harry and Hermione exchanged some wary looks, apprehensively waiting for whatever would come next; be it the tau spectrum or something else entirely.

"Still waiting for the great epiphany, Filius," Snape remarked languidly.

"This is science, Severus," Flitwick retorted, still concentrating on his work. "There is no epiphany, there is knowledge."

"Hey," Harry pleasantly tossed in, "that actually sounds a little like a line from the Jedi code."

A few uncomprehending eyes turned to him.

"Again, Harry," Hermione said with a barely suppressed smile. "Not the right place. Also, you are _such_ a geek."

"Oh, like you aren't," he gave right back, not even trying to suppress his smile.

"Geek is a lie," she replied, grinning unabashedly now. "There is only passion."

They shared a laugh, entirely oblivious to their surroundings for no more than a blissful second. Then they became aware of the totally flummoxed and partly amused gazes that were collectively directed at them, with even Dobby curiously squinting at them from behind his eyepiece, and they abruptly fell quiet after awkwardly clearing their throats.

"Anyway," Professor McGonagall said, shaking the confusion off herself. "Getting back to the issue at hand, where are we with whatever spectrums you are looking at there, Filius?"

"Well, well, well," the busy professor replied pensively. "Yes, yes. Most fascinating."

Then, for the first time in many minutes, he pulled back from the eyepiece and turned to face the expectant audience. Before speaking he took a deep breath – which, deliberate or not, served to give the moment a rather dramatic quality.

"It seems the magic word here – no pun intended – is, quite simply, affinity."

Harry and Hermione eyed each other just a little warily at that, and then quickly looked away again.

"I'm sure everyone is at least to some degree familiar with the term itself," Flitwick continued, "and has maybe heard of some of its different applications, like chemical affinity, for instance. Now, there is of course also within our circles something we refer to as magical affinity, a concept everyone here should know of as well. All things that have magical properties – which are, I might add, at their most basic level no less chemical in their nature than anything else – stand in a certain state of relation and interaction to one another; their magical energies, much like the magnetic field around each and every one of us, are in constant flux and interdependency. They mutually affect one another; there is always some kind of influence, and magical currents are all around us.

"Magic, as you all know, is also very strongly linked to our emotions. That's why for some spells it is very important for the caster to be in a specific emotional state to successfully cast the spell; an obvious example being the Unforgivable Curses, which are – legally forbidden and morally unforgivable as they additionally may be – quite impossible to cast for anyone incapable of channeling all the deepest, the fiercest and the most consuming kind of hatred, scorn and malice into one dark pit of raw magical force. So against common believe most Slytherin students would not be able to cast one of those spells on an average day of any given week. Likewise there are spells hard to accomplish when you lack the necessary empathy and compassion, like many of the more advanced healing spells our good Madam Pomfrey here is so adept at casting.

"Now, even this table here, as even a Muggle would instantly suspect once faced with its strikingly legless appearance, has magical properties; currents flowing through it. Being – at least by our admittedly wacky standards – a pretty average table, those currents are rather placid; the magical energy has a very low level. So even while there is some interaction between my magical field and that of this table right now, those interactions are entirely negligible and will drop to zero as soon as I step away from it. That's why, for example, I would not suddenly teleport to it in the middle of the night. Which, I suppose, leads me to the core of the matter."

Hearing that both Harry and Hermione stiffened visibly.

"Magical affinity is a completely natural and ubiquitous thing," Flitwick assured them, quite aware of their tension. "It exists, in principle, between all things that possess magical properties, especially living beings. What varies greatly, of course, is the intensity of said affinity, which might, once measured, actually turn out to be zero or even less, like maybe between Professor Snape and the rest of the world," a comment that elicited no more than a wry smile from Snape, "in which case it would be more precise to speak of aversion rather than affinity. But the principle of an interdependent force, be it repellent or attractive, stays the same."

He paused and smiled warmly at Harry and Hermione.

"And, well, I guess it's safe to assume we all know the kind we are dealing with here even without me blabbering away about it."

While Professor Flitwick himself seemed to be rather pleased with his little monologue, what ensued afterwards was a contemplative silence amongst the attentive listeners.

"So," Harry spoke up after increasingly awkward seconds of no one saying a word, "you are basically saying that the teleportation happens because Hermione and I share a more profound bond than you and that table there?"

Professor Flitwick laughed at that and clapped his long-fingered hands together. "It's not quite that simple and the degree of difference in the involved levels of affinity is quite immense," he said, "but in principle you are right."

"But you said the teleportation was caused by the both of us, right?" Hermione asked. "How exactly does that work, especially given the distance between us at the times these incidents happened?"

"Well, you see," Flitwick explained, "while magical affinity is an everyday occurrence and something that you are either born with, as in the case of blood-related family, or something that can develop based on an already existent foundation that has something to do with the natural configuration of each individual's magical properties, I suppose the intensity in this specific case might be called uncommon, though probably not singular in its strength. There was, for example, surely a remarkably strong magical affinity between Harry and his mother, which would be an important part in the explanation of his survival of the killing curse. There is almost always some considerable affinity between parents and child, siblings, and also between good friends and colleagues, people who associate with one another over extended periods of time, but such levels as I suspect between Harry and his mother or – as I can see quite clearly through this eyepiece here – between the two of you, certainly are a rare phenomenon indeed."

"So what does that mean, exactly?" Hermione asked with a hint of foreboding in her voice. "Are we… like, relatives?"

"Only figuratively," answered Flitwick with a smile. "Certainly not by blood, but quite clearly… well, let's say, by magic."

Hermione looked skeptical. "That sounds an awful lot like something Professor Trelawney would drivel about."

Again Professor Flitwick laughed good-naturedly. "Well, the difference being that you can analyze the unambiguous data for yourself right here. I'm not talking about the constellation of planets during the moments of your independent births here, or some soggy tea leaves. I'm talking about actual, physical phenomena. And I can tell you that the incidents of teleportation always happen when _both_ your magical energy fields breach a certain threshold. I do not yet know what conditions it depends on who of you actually teleports, but it's clear that it only happens when _both_ your energetic levels reach their peak – rawest and the least controlled in only two states of the mind, one of them being the unconscious one, the other one… well, let's skip that for the time being. What happens then can roughly be compared to a lightning; an electrostatic discharge between electrically charged areas. In this case – metaphorically speaking – from one cloud to another with some distance between them. It's not a one-sided thing. It's triggered by the interdependency of two agents. Namely… you."

Harry looked more than a little muddled when he said, "So, uh, what? One of our magical energy… field… thingies… is like, 'Hey you, how's it going? Wanna hang out?' and then the other one is like, 'Sure thing. Your place or mine?' and then a lightning strikes?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," Flitwick confirmed amusedly. "All chemical reactions drive the system to a state of equilibrium in which the affinities of the reactions vanish, as Muggle chemist Ilya Prigogine put it. Of course, what we generally call magical affinity does not simply vanish, but the strictly chemical part of it does, at least temporarily. You have to understand that prior to every teleportation both your bodily functions as well as your magical currents build up to what I can only describe as a thunderstorm. It's boisterous, tumultuous, tempestuous. And once it reaches its raging climax the teleportation happens and then – and only then – it all calms down into a state that might very well be called equilibrium. It evens out. I'm sure you can imagine the corresponding waveform."

"While that is all very interesting, Filius," Professor McGonagall spoke up, "and I once more commend your scientific prowess, I cannot help but wonder where in all this lies the hint of a solution, which, as I feel the need to mention, is still what we are trying to find here, as intellectually pleasing as our little symposium might be."

"Right, right," Flitwick hastily replied. "Of course, yes. But, uh, well… that's actually the less satisfying part of it all."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that I don't really see a solution as of yet," he reluctantly admitted, readjusting the collar of his shirt a little. "While the phenomenon itself is basically very ordinary, as I've said, the dramatic scale it takes and the rather drastic symptoms it shows are all but ordinary. Normally there is nothing to solve in these matters; no problem to be defined as such. A high magical affinity is usually just beneficial to the magical capabilities of the individuals involved, who tend to amplify each other's energetic levels. So in this regard I can only imagine the impressive potential Mr. Potter and Miss Granger would have when combining their skills. Apart from that, of course, the magical affinity can also be understood as something of an indicator for a different kind of affinity, if you will. One a bit more, say, interpersonal."

"So there is still nothing we can do?" Madam Pomfrey asked worriedly.

"Well," Flitwick replied, clearly uncomfortable, "I'm obviously not finished with analyzing the data. But… well, again, we are dealing with the problematic symptoms of something that to my knowledge has never been looked at as a problem itself."

"So we are basically looking for a problem to an unknown solution now," Snape remarked tonelessly, his arms crossed in front of his chest. "How refreshing."

"I don't understand!" Hermione suddenly burst out, and everyone abruptly turned towards her in surprise. "I mean, what exactly does any of this mean? Why is this happening now and why to us? What is the purpose of something this blatantly irrational? Why would our magical energy fields do that? You don't see Ron teleporting into his sister's bed, and they are actually, literally related and I'm sure they have some very fine affinity going on."

"Now there's a disturbing picture," Snape mumbled with his eyebrows raised.

"And do you look at Harry as someone like a brother?" Flitwick asked her casually, his expression perfectly composed.

Hermione threw a timid glance at the boy in question and he met her eyes only for the briefest fracture of a second before looking anywhere but at her.

"Well, no," she answered, somewhat vexed by the question. "Of course not. He's obviously not my brother, so why would I see him as such? I prefer to call each thing by its right name."

"I have no doubt you do," said Flitwick, then inclined his head in an apologetic gesture. "I didn't mean to pry, and quite frankly I'm relieved."

"Relieved?" Hermione asked, wrinkling her forehead in confusion. "Why would you be relieved?"

To her increasing bewilderment, the professor, still standing on his chair, blushed visibly and began to fiddle with his hands all of a sudden.

"I just meant that it would have been a little, uh, surprising," he stammered awkwardly, "and maybe a little disturbing as well. If your answer had been different, I mean."

Hermione narrowed her eyes at him in wary suspicion, while all those around them watched the exchange with both interest as well as some degree of amusement. Even Dobby looked up from the eyepiece he still had been gazing into up until now.

"I'm not sure I follow," she slowly said, and it sounded very much like an implicit demand for clarification. Somehow, the teacher-student dynamic seemed to have been inverted somewhere along the way.

"Well, this is… this is clearly a rather delicate matter," Flitwick evaded clumsily, then cleared his throat once or twice.

"If it is about me, I believe I have a right to know," Hermione pressed unwaveringly.

"Indubitably," Flitwick agreed, no less evasively.

Hermione slowly tapped her fingers on her arm and scrutinized her Charms professor of six years intently. At last he relented, proceeding to exhale a jittery breath and flatten his shirt with unsteady hands, then clearing his throat again.

"As I… as I mentioned earlier, magic is intricately linked to our emotions," he began reluctantly. "Our research in the field has come a long way over the past few decades and today, well, analyzing a person's magical energy spectra, which my bracelets were made to record during your sleep, is like reading a book about their emotions. It's all in the patterns and the waveforms, the frequencies and the amplitudes. So, uh, by looking through that eyepiece behind me, I can tell with quite a substantial degree of precision what emotions were prevalent during the time you were asleep. And one should not underestimate the raw emotional flux that comes to light during a state of unconsciousness."

Hermione hesitated for a moment, biting her lower lip as she was wont to do in moments of intense contemplation. Ultimately she did not relent, and instead challenged the flustered professor even further – maybe even against her better judgment.

"So? It should be quite clear that I have a great deal of affection for Harry even without putting us under a microscope. You implicitly said as much earlier. We have been friends for six years now. I shouldn't think seeing that represented in waveforms would make it any different."

Professor Flitwick shifted on his chair, which made said chair creak a little even under his moderate weight. "Well, I don't believe this is the best time to be too explicit about this," he said nervously, "but if you insist, then let us just say that some of the patterns I observed are far too libidinous in nature to nourish the idea of the two of you feeling like siblings in any way, shape or form."

"I beg your pardon?" asked Hermione, utterly flabbergasted.

"Libidiwhatnow?" asked Harry, equaling his female counterpart in disbelief if not in eloquence.

The only person in the room who remained as pale as chalk was Snape, who merely watched the scene unfold with smug amusement. As for all the others, it was hard to say who achieved the deepest shade of red, with even Dobby's green cheeks turning a distinguishable shade of purple. He most inconspicuously pushed the eyepiece aside with the back of his hand, as if trying to appear like he had never peeked through it at all.

Madam Pomfrey was entirely flustered, unable to decide how to move and where to look. While Professor McGonagall busied herself with cleaning her glasses, Harry and Hermione seemed to be perfectly petrified, motionlessly staring and gaping at Professor Flitwick with their eyebrows raised to their hairlines and their unblinking eyes widened to almost perfect circles. Most embarrassed of all, however, still looked Professor Flitwick himself, presumably wishing for the ground to open up beneath him and swallow him whole – chair included, if need be.

And then someone spoke and everyone cringed, for no one knew who it was since everyone knew that it hadn't been themselves.

"Forgive me the cheap phrase and the nostalgic sentiment," the voice spoke calmly; thin yet clear, soft and yet pervasive, "and while I'm at it, my dramatic entrance as well – but things sure seemed simpler back in our times."

And with that, no other than Professor Dumbledore himself stood amidst them, regarding them all with warm eyes and a friendly smile, somehow managing to welcome them all in a room he had just entered last.

"Headmaster!" Professor McGonagall greeted him in sheer surprise.

"Please, Minerva," Dumbledore replied, "there is no reason for fancy titles. I have, quite truthfully, had enough of those after attending the congress in London. I am always amazed anew at just how many titles people like to make up, and no less saddened to see how much they tend to cling to them."

"I just didn't expect… I didn't mean to—"

"Of course, Minerva," he reassured her gently. "But pray tell, whatever might I have so obtrusively stumbled into here? Pardon me for saying, but you all look a little like you are all at sea."

Somehow, everyone suspected the Headmaster already knew exactly what he had stepped into, but nevertheless Professor McGonagall spoke up to explain.

"We are, once more, trying to make sense of the little conundrum Mr. Potter and Miss Granger have been delighting us with this week. There have been some new developments, but I was informed of them barely an hour ago myself and I didn't deem it appropriate to bother you with the matter again just yet."

"And here I am," said Dumbledore pleasantly. "Bothering myself, witty fool that I am. May I enquire as to what new developments you speak of?"

"Well," McGonagall answered, "this time – the fourth teleportation overall, if I am still keeping track correctly – it appears that it was Miss Granger who actually teleported, ending up in Mr. Potter's sleeping arrangements instead of the other way around, which, as you might imagine, greatly complicated the matter."

"Is that so?" Dumbledore mused, mustering Harry and Hermione – one more shamefaced than the other – over the rim of his glasses with a twinkle in his eyes. "Complicated, you say?"

"Filius explained a lot of it," McGonagall revealed. "Although I'm afraid that for all the explanations, academically engaging as they certainly were, we are none the wiser."

"Alas, wisdom is a cautious friend," said Dumbledore, turning around to have a look at the enormous apparatus behind Professor Flitwick. "I should very much like to have a look at your work, if that is alright with you, Filius."

"Certainly, certainly," Flitwick invited him with a motion of his hand, hectically adjusting the eyepiece to be a little more appropriate for someone of the size of the Headmaster.

Dumbledore gave Flitwick a thankful smile – and Dobby a playful wink – before leaning forward to look through the eyepiece. While he quietly remained like that for a while, no one else dared to speak up either. At some point he seemed to whisper something to Professor Flitwick, who then switched a few switches and pressed a button or two.

"Remarkable," the Headmaster then said a few seconds later. "Most impressive, indeed."

With that last bit of information Flitwick had provided them with in mind, Harry and Hermione each felt their cheeks heat up to feverish heights. After today, standing in the girls' dormitories in the middle of the night again, with a cat rubbing up against his bare legs, would surely seem like an average everyday kind of situation to Harry. It was, after all, truly all relative.

"This is turning out to be quite a week for great revelations and unprecedented progress," Dumbledore then said pensively, still gazing through the eyepiece. "Just Tuesday, after no more than half a day of discourse and disagreement, the congress of the European Magical Society actually ended up agreeing – if not unanimously – that magical society might just be trailing behind Muggle society in a few specific areas by about a handful of centuries. And now we are looking at all these beautiful spectra of interwoven magical energies here, at these intricate patterns and detailed waveforms, only made possible by the most sophisticated kind of magical technology, to determine that our two young students here are, in fact, quite comfortable around each other."

He leaned back from the instruments and turned around to face them with the most amused expression on his features.

"Well, we _are_ still looking for the problem," remarked Snape sarcastically.

"Indeed, Severus," Dumbledore replied, regarding him with a knowing look. "Indeed."

Then he looked at each and every one of them, one by one, slowly and patiently, with his hands loosely folded in front of him, smiling the faintest of smiles all throughout.

"I believe we are done here," he then announced softly and to everyone's visible bafflement.

"Professor Dumbledore?" McGonagall asked, just as if she hadn't heard him quite right.

"You have done excellent work," said Dumbledore, and if it hadn't been for the fact that no one in the room really felt like they had accomplished anything, they might have been able to believe him. "All of you. But for now, I think we have made all the progress that is to be made with instruments and data. Besides, this is a school day, after all, and as Headmaster – tiresome as the title might sometimes be – I bear a certain responsibility to make sure our students receive the education they deserve, and are in desperate need of in some cases. You all have classes to teach and pupils who impatiently await your appearances. Let us not make them wait any longer."

Professor McGonagall took a deep breath in obvious preparation to say something, but then she simply breathed the whole air out again in a long sigh when she saw the look that Dumbledore gave her.

"A week of great revelations, indeed," she then said, suppressing a smile. "Our Headmaster appears to know what he's doing." And then, addressing all others, she added, "Let us leave and get on with our schedule. I actually have the seventh year Slytherins coming up. Talk about desperate need for education."

Snape wrinkled his nose at that comment. "They sure lack some of your Gryffindors' _innovative spirit_," he said with a deprecating look at Harry and Hermione, "but to be perfectly honest, I believe I can live with that just fine."

With a curt inclination of his head at Dumbledore, he turned swiftly around and left through the same door he had entered through earlier. Madam Pomfrey followed him, while Professor Flitwick was still busy turning off his apparatus and reducing it to the size of his palm again.

"Say what you will," he then said joyfully, "but for me this has all been one unexpectedly interesting endeavor. I believe I might just end up writing a treatise about my observations and newest insights into the multifarious subject of magical affinity gained through all of this. And I have the two of you to thank for it." He regarded Harry and Hermione with an appreciative look and then smiled when he noticed their apprehensive expressions. "Oh, don't worry," he reassured them with unconcealed amusement, "your identities are entirely confidential and will find no mention in my work."

"I should be very interested to read that," Professor Dumbledore told him. "And I have no doubt your work will, once more, be well received in the scientific community."

With a bow Flitwick took his leave, while Professor McGonagall gave Dumbledore one last smile. Then she considered Harry and Hermione with a lingering, skeptical look as she finally left with swift and steady steps. When the two were about to steal away as well, Dumbledore's voice made them halt midstep.

"Harry, Hermione," he said calmly. "A minute, if you would be so kind."

Each fighting a lump that had spontaneously formed in their throats, they slowly turned around again and made a few tentative steps back towards the Headmaster; each of them feeling like they were in first year again and got caught for some mischief for the first time.

"Now, raise your heads, you two," he told them gently. "There is no reason to look so crestfallen. I would merely like very much to ask a favor of you – or two, in the case of Miss Granger."

Both of the addressed looked quizzically up at him and Dumbledore couldn't help but chuckle ever so lightly at the similarities in their doubtful expressions. He shook his head and gave off a weak, nearly inaudible sigh.

"I don't believe I have ever had quite the likes of you under my care during my many decades as both teacher and Headmaster at Hogwarts," he mused. "You are quite a pair, indeed."

Harry and Hermione each looked to exactly the side where the other was not.

"I have watched you two grow up for all these years now; witnessed two lonely kids, that always felt like they were on the outside looking in, finally find a home they could look out from together. And while I am very pleased that maybe I might have contributed the smallest part to that, by welcoming you into this little haven of ours, I have no doubt that the actual home you found was much less physical in nature, though certainly not any less real. I want you to know that I admire you greatly. The both of you. Rarely have I learned more from anyone who bore the title of professor than from the two of you."

Unsure of what to make of that, Harry and Hermione kept quiet, quickly running out of places to look at that did not contain any other people.

"In an attempt to make things a little less awkward for the three of us," Dumbledore continued with a smile, "I will now skip the babble and get straight to the favors I was about to ask of you."

Even though they would have liked nothing more than to vanish into thin air right now, Harry and Hermione forced themselves to look at their Headmaster, because that was the polite thing to do. The twinkle in his eyes always made it hard to look away again once it caught you, even though it made you feel like you were translucent all of a sudden.

"The favor I would like to ask of the two of you is, quite simply, this," he said, then paused and looked each of them deep in the eye. "Do what the two of you have always done so commendably, so admirably, so naturally – so capably beyond your years. Do what you have always excelled at together."

Right now, they merely looked at him in equal incomprehension, although they did so very much together and very naturally for sure.

He smiled the most twinkling smile at them when he said, "Communicate."

For now, that didn't exactly reduce the general incomprehension by all that much, and Harry and Hermione just shared a puzzled look that lasted long enough to make them both gulp and quickly turn away again.

"The second favor is even simpler than that," Dumbledore let them know after waiting for their quiet exchange to pass with an amused expression. "Miss Granger," he said affectionately, "I would like you to have a most memorable and unforgettable eighteenth birthday, for which I will congratulate you no earlier than tomorrow."

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_Better three minutes too late than an hour too soon:_ Another Shakespeare reference. It unintentionally became something of a thing during the writing process. The original line is from _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ and reads, "Better three hours too soon than a minute too late." I suppose no small part of the humor in that is actually imagining Snape reading _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.

_Jedi & Sith code:_ Super anachronism crisis! Well, first things first. This is an allusion to Star Wars. You might have heard of it. It was a thing once; a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But… ! While, if I'm not mistaken, the Jedi code first appeared in the Timothy Zahn novel _Heir to the Empire_ in 1995, the Sith code had its first appearance in BioWare's computer game _Knights of the Old Republic_ in – and that's the bad part – 2003.

The line Harry is thinking of when he hears Professor Flitwick talk is "There is no ignorance, there is only knowledge," from the Jedi code.

Hermione then paraphrases a line from the Sith code that reads "Peace is a lie, there is only passion," and thereby effectively ruins all continuity that ever was.

Well done, Hermione.

_Doctor Zhivago:_ When Hermione states that she prefers to call each thing by its right name, that's an allusion to and a quote from Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel _Doctor Zhivago_. It's also poignantly used in Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's 1996 non-fiction book of the same name, _Into the Wild_; a story that is very near and dear to my heart.

_Witty fool:_ And yet another allusion to William S. – who is just ridiculously quotable. It refers to the line "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit," from _Twelfth Night_.


	8. Convergence

**Author's Note:** Well, I did anticipate that the seventh chapter would arouse some serious soul-bond associations. And I'm not just saying that like those annoying _ex post facto_ hindsight experts who always insist on telling you they _knew_ something was going to happen right _after_ it has happened, yet never seem to deem it reasonable to inform you of it beforehand. "I knew you'd get run over by a car the moment I saw you stepping onto the street!" – "Thanks, pal. That's… very helpful."

At any rate, I generally can't blame anyone for harboring such suspicions or coming to that sort of conclusion, even though I personally prefer not to look at it in exactly those terms. I will, of course, refrain from explaining my own reasons and intentions at this point, since it's not all said and done quite yet. And I really wanted to restrain myself from going crazy with a ridiculously long afterword again, like I did with Amor Veritatis. It was really just meant as a way to communicate with the collective readership, though, and back in 2011 I was young and inexperienced. This year I'm all about being old, wise and bitter.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter which labels you attach to a story. The story is either good or it's not, and that's that. If you like my story and prefer to describe it as a Sappy-Soul-Bond-Siren-AU-OOC-Crackfic-Delusion-Tri p-Without-Jeff-Goldblum, then that's fine by me. I guess.

Anyway, here comes the penultimate chapter (excluding the epilogue), wherein some things happen and others don't.

* * *

**• Chapter VIII •**

**Convergence**

Ron couldn't complain. As far as he was concerned, this had been a perfectly fine week. Classes had been okay for the most part and there was now only one more left before another weekend was safely reached. Even his homework for History, which Hermione had so vehemently refused to let him copy, had turned out to be quite alright, which was all the more surprising to him considering he had already forgotten most of what he had written. He had made progress with his Quidditch practice and felt that he was back on track to being Gryffindor's number one Keeper, putting McLaggen – the only set of teeth that could be seen from space – back where he belonged. With only two more hours of Charms ahead and a nice party in sight to kick off the weekend, Ron was sitting down in his usual seat in the Great Hall in anticipation of a good lunch feeling altogether breezy.

Poor Ron.

With a healthy and much yearned for bite of Yorkshire pudding halfway on its way to its destination, Ron froze with his mouth hanging open when someone slumped down next to him and said something that sounded like the most depressingly drawn-out thing between _Hi_ and _Hey_. With a longing look at his pudding and a wistful sigh, Ron dropped it back onto his plate and turned to face the pitiful figure that was his brown-haired friend.

"I would ask what's wrong," he told her, "but I'm not sure I want to."

"Don't," Hermione replied. "For both our sakes, don't."

"That good?" he asked with a crooked smile. "You got me curious."

"Great," she scoffed. "Exactly what I wanted. Seriously, Ron. Let's just not talk about it."

"Just to make sure I know what I am not supposed to mention, you mean how you teleported into Harry's bed this time, right?"

Hermione swirled around with a shocked expression. "How do you know about that?" she asked him sharply, her ire quick to rise when she saw his barely concealed amusement.

"I think the source can be traced back to the kitchens this time," Ron explained, having a hard time keeping his lips in something that at least resembled a straight line, but trying very hard since he actually planned on surviving lunch. "So my guess is, Dobby told Winky and then five seconds later the rest of the school knew."

Hermione sighed exasperatedly. "This place is a joke," she grumbled, angrily glancing around the hall. "They might as well install security cameras all over the place."

Ron watched her quietly for a moment, then he suddenly stretched his arms into the air and loudly and solemnly – in a voice that sounded more like a classic Santa Claus – exclaimed, "Happy birthday!"

Hermione rolled her eyes at him in annoyance, even though at least one twitching corner of her lips betrayed her just a little.

"Your present better be good this year," she told him in a mock warning.

"I had to settle for second best," he casually said. "But this is still me we are talking about, so don't you worry."

"Right," she replied in a drawn-out fashion. "I have a very special box in my attic back home for my collection of Ron's marvelous gifts."

"Hey, I have feelings too, you know?" he complained, pouting exaggeratedly.

Just in that moment his stomach growled rather loudly and Hermione raised an eyebrow at him.

"And you sure know how to express them."

Then, as – much to Ron's puzzlement – Hermione's demeanor changed visibly all of a sudden and she turned to look at her empty plate instead, he felt and heard someone slump down on his other side. Of course he knew who it was even before looking at him. When he turned and was just about to clap his black-haired friend on the back in a well-meant greeting, his hand froze in midair when he noticed the way he looked. Pressing his lips together, Ron dropped his hand and simply looked at him, waiting for something like a sign of life for a few seconds. When nothing of the kind came, he spoke up himself instead.

"So we are _all_ in a good mood today," he said. "Why didn't you guys tell me? I would've worn all black."

"You don't have all black," Harry replied flatly. "You say it makes you look pale."

"It just doesn't bring out the best in me," Ron mumbled defensively.

After that everyone fell quiet and Ron looked back and forth between his two friends a few times, wondering when last he had actually sat between them like this. They usually sat either across from or next to each other, and had done so for what seemed to be the entire stretch Ron's memory was able to put together, which frankly might not have meant all that much. But still, this was more than a little odd and it made him feel a whole lot less comfortable than he had intended to feel today.

"Seriously, guys," he ended up blurting out when he couldn't take the silence any longer, which took about three seconds. "What happened to you? I know this is our special crazy week and I can't tell you how much I've been enjoying it, but this is just plain weird."

"We're really sorry this is all so very awkward for you," Harry said with more sarcasm in his voice than Ron had food on his plate.

"Hey, don't give me that passive-aggressive attitude. How can you expect me to handle a situation I know nothing about? At least give me something to work with here."

"That's actually a surprisingly good point," Hermione feebly mumbled without taking her eyes off her food.

"You might not have heard that, since you are sitting half a mile apart," Ron said to Harry while pointing into Hermione's general direction with his thumb, "but Hermione just said that I made a good point. So, since this is apparently a Friday of first times, you might as well tell me what's going on for once."

"It was just a whole lot of information to swallow, okay?" Harry answered ill-temperedly. "We had the great pleasure of witnessing our thoughts and feelings being put under the microscope and then we had a nice chat about it with Snape and the rest of the band. Even Dumbledore joined the fun at some point. It was perfectly hilarious, Ron. Sorry that you missed it, but I guess everyone already knows about it anyway. What is it with this bloody castle? It's an Orwellian nightmare come true."

The look Harry gave some of those around them who once more eyed him with an excessive amount of amused nosiness was by itself enough to make them quickly turn away again.

"But I thought you wanted to know what all of this teleportation stuff was about, too," Ron wondered, handling Harry's temper with his usual disregard; a tactic battle-tested over many years.

"Yeah, well," Harry grumbled, his ire taking a more subdued shape already, "maybe I didn't want to know quite that much."

Ron threw a quick glance to his other side to see how Hermione was faring, and he was tempted to try and spot the ten differences about her since last he had looked at her. It would have been hard enough to find two.

"So, uh," he said, looking at no one in particular, "Dumbledore was there too, you say?"

From the corner of his eye Ron saw that Harry merely shrugged his shoulders in response.

"And what did he do?" Ron asked. "Did he help?"

"He asked a favor of us."

Ron thought about what to make of that unexpected information for a moment.

"A favor?"

With an unnerved sigh Harry threw his strikingly unused napkin onto the table and looked anywhere but at Ron.

"He asked us to… _communicate_," he then told him, emphasizing the last word in a mocking, almost disdainful manner and shaking his head.

Ron's eyebrows went up at that and he looked at Harry with that exact expression frozen on his features for a moment before slowly turning his head to Hermione on his right side, his expression unchanged. Without her taking any perceivable notice of him he watched her for a few seconds as she absentmindedly picked around in her food with a fork, blinked, and then again slowly turned back to Harry on his left side, who vacantly stared into space.

"So how's that going for ya?" he asked them gleefully, still unable to get his eyebrows back to where they normally belonged.

Harry winced a little as if woken from a daydream and began to stand up in irritation.

"Yeah, anyway," he said. "I'm not really hungry. See you later."

And then he just strode off with conspicuously quick steps. Even while Ron was still processing that puzzling event, a shuffling on his other side took his attention.

"I have to be somewhere," Hermione said, already beginning to walk away – slow enough, as Ron suspected, to not catch up with Harry. "Bye, Ron."

Two questions were most prevalent on Ron's mind in that moment, the first one being if his eyebrows would ever be able to settle back into moderate heights again and the second one being if either of the two even realized that all three of them shared the same afternoon schedule. Somehow he could already imagine the new seating order that awaited him in Professor Flitwick's classroom. Charms really promised to be a blast today.

Getting back to his food, Ron – to his increasing frustration – found himself unable to really enjoy it in any appropriate way and instead felt a plan taking shape in his head, bit by bit during bite after bite.

Sometimes a Weasley's just gotta do what a Weasley's gotta do.

~•~

The sky was clearing up that afternoon, no more than a few flimsy clouds swiftly drifting about on early autumn winds with the sun once more bathing the castle and its peaceful surroundings in its rays of light; warming mostly by appearance rather than actual temperature.

Hermione had therefore chosen to put on a thick black coat before going outside, and standing on Hogwarts' long main bridge that connected the cliffs the castle stood upon with the hills that led down into Hogsmeade, she was glad she had done so. For all the unhindered sunrays that tinged the scenery in golden light, the wind had quite a cooling quality about it, and cursing her genetically thinner female skin Hermione stood waiting with her hands buried deep in the pockets of her coat. Why of all places had he insisted on meeting her here? Then again, at least she had the inspiring view to take in.

Looking out over the valley under the bridge that gently opened up to where the lake lay neatly nestled in between the highlands, she gave an involuntary sigh. While she certainly wasn't someone who saw her own birthday as a significant event and she had a hard time grasping why people tended to make such a fuss about an arbitrary date on the calendar, she wasn't above feeling some extra self-pity for so far having a remarkably depressing eighteenth birthday either. Memorable, indeed. She would have a hard time forgetting the utter mess the week leading up to this day had been. And so far it actually seemed set to become the pitiful low point of it all. Dumbledore would surely have a lot to congratulate her for come tomorrow.

She didn't know how many minutes had passed when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye and turned to her side to see more clearly what it was. It was a person, slowly approaching her and still a few dozen steps away, and with every step he took she grew increasingly certain that he was not the one she had been told to expect, her own suspicions put aside. The hair alone was finally enough to put all doubt to rest. And then, when he was just a few meters away from her, he made a shrugging, half-apologetic gesture at her.

"You are not Ron," she greeted him with a keen observation, to which he responded with a tentative, lopsided smile.

"And neither are you," he said, positioning himself next to her and mirroring her in leaning onto the parapet; their elbows not quite touching.

"That scheming bastard," Hermione cursed, shaking her head in disbelief.

Harry's smile widened. One didn't hear her swear so openly very often. Only last week she had admonished a boy from first year, telling him that _bastard_ wasn't a nice word. Well, she was obviously not trying to be nice right now.

"Did you suspect anything?" he asked her.

She gave a snort. "When he told me he wanted to show me something on the bridge?" she replied sarcastically. "I didn't know if I should call the police or just panic and run away screaming. What did he tell you?"

"Just that he wanted to talk to me in private. Very casually. On this very casual bridge, apparently. So, yeah… I had a whole speech prepared, telling him that I just don't feel that way about him."

"I would've really liked to hear that one," Hermione musingly remarked.

"Well," said he, "it wasn't meant for your ears."

A silence ensued that had more than one quality about it, though a latent awkwardness certainly was part of it. And as awkwardness is wont to do, especially the silent kind, it increased with every passing second until both of them were unable to concentrate on the view any longer – inspiring as it was – and instead spent all their energy on trying to decide what to say next.

"So I guess—"

"Since we are—"

They shared a quiet, bashful laugh at that and before any kind of awkward silence could come right back between them, Harry was quick to ask her, "You were saying?"

"Just that… I mean, now that we're both here, anyway…"

"We might as well talk?"

She gave him a timid smile. "I guess we would make a lot of people strangely happy if we did."

"Yeah, I've been noticing that too," Harry answered. "We might have been nudged into that general direction by some. Although _nudged_ is probably putting it mildly…"

"More like pushed and shoved," Hermione agreed, nodding her head. "And tricked into by our unexpectedly devious friend, to top it all off."

With a fading smile Harry let his eyes wander over the calm waters of the lake for a moment, glistening in the sunlight. He could see the docks of Hogsmeade on the western shore.

"It's not usually something we need any help with, though," he then pensively said. "Is it?"

"No," Hermione replied, equally thoughtful. "I don't think it ever was. But in our defense, this hasn't exactly been a usual week for us."

"Can't argue with that," Harry concurred in a low mumble.

Hermione hesitated for a moment. "So, what do you think?" she then asked him. "I mean, about all of it. About whatever happened over the last few days."

"Well," he said, "we had a perfectly normal Sunday and then I took center stage and messed everything up, I guess. You might not have noticed yet, but I have a real knack for doing that."

She regarded him with a smile even while shaking her head at his unnecessary, but so familiar self-deprecation. He knew her general opinion about that, so she didn't even have to comment on it. Instead she turned her head again to look anywhere but at him, and her smile quickly vanished from her lips.

"Do you think… I mean, would you say that…" she began, then broke off and sighed in frustration over her own lack of eloquence when, as it seemed to her, it counted the most. As a last resort she finally just blurted out, "Has anything changed between us?"

Harry regarded her with an amused expression. "You mean apart from us teleporting into each other's beds and spending the nights together?"

She rolled her eyes, blushing ever so slightly. "Apart from that, yes. Though not necessarily disconnected from it."

His jocular mood waned quickly, leaving him thoughtful in the passing seconds leading up to his next words.

"I obviously can't speak for the both of us," he said, slowly and carefully, "but as far as I'm concerned… I suppose you could say something seems to have changed."

"Like what?"

"Like this right here? We've never had to talk about… well, about us this way. About where we stand or what's going on or whatever. To me that's a pretty clear sign that something has changed."

"And what exactly is that something?" she probed further.

He merely gave a shrug, yet no sign of any other kind of answer. Hermione didn't know what pushed her to be so outspoken, but after a few seconds she heard herself ask, "Do you… do you see me differently than you used to, in any way?"

"No," he said, and since he didn't look at her he couldn't see how taken aback and insecure she looked at that, until after a pause during which she could only hear her own heartbeat drumming inside her ears he added, "At least I don't think so. What has changed, it seems to me, is the way I consciously think about it. About you."

"How do you mean?"

"Damn," he breathed with a smile, "I should've started asking the questions. Now I'm stuck being the one who has to answer them all."

"Sorry," she meekly said, smiling sheepishly back at him. "I'm sneaky like that."

"That's alright," he assured her and exhaled a sigh before continuing. "What I mean is… well, it's not like I suddenly, from one moment to the next, looked at you differently. It feels more like I finally became aware of how I've been looking at you for quite a while now, you know? I mean, I've practically always thought that you are pretty, for example—"

"You have?" she asked; her eyebrows raised in genuine surprise and the color on her cheeks maybe not solely caused by the cold wind.

"Of course," he casually affirmed. "And let me say two things about that. Firstly, that I remember becoming aware of that for the first time during third year, when we used the Time-Turner together and you put it over my neck for the first time, so we had to stand really close together. That was my personal _'Damn, my best friend is hot'_ epiphany."

"Seriously?" she asked, well-nigh bewildered and entirely unable to lower her eyebrows. "I… I had no idea."

"I didn't make a big deal out of it," he told her. "It's a normal thing, right? With us entering a certain age back then and everything."

Hermione needed a few seconds to try to wrap her head around that revelation, but when she found herself somewhat unable to fully do that she asked, "And secondly?"

"Well, uh," he answered reluctantly, then softly cleared his throat. "Secondly, you obviously still knocked the air out of my lungs and bowled me over when you appeared at the top of the stairs in that blue dress of yours at the Yule Ball back in fourth year. So, to stick to the established terminology, that was probably my _'Holy crap, my best friend is gorgeous' _epiphany."

"B-but…" Hermione began, then stumbled over her own thoughts; positively flustered right now. "But you had a crush on Cho Chang back then."

"Yes," Harry concurred naturally, nodding his head. "I most definitely had. And that's really part of what I'm trying to say."

"It is?" she asked, her confusion not decreasing at all.

"I just never really thought about it, you know?" he began to explain. "About me being male and you being female and me finding you attractive; about the connotations of that, and the possibility of anything that might arise from those. I perceived it without reflection. I mean, we already knew each other so well when our hormones said hello for the first time. You already had such a special place in my life, one I wouldn't even know how to fill with anyone but you. It would be impossible to even try, because it's not just that you are filling that place, you _are_ that place. It seemed to be set somehow, like that's how it was supposed to be. Those were our roles in each other's lives. And anything else? Any kind of possible change? I never let it in, never opened that door."

He fell silent for a moment and left Hermione wishing that he would keep talking, for she found herself utterly unable to speak at all. And then he did.

"And that's what has changed," he said, turning his head to look at her even while she forcefully kept her gaze straight ahead, intensely aware of his eyes on her. "I opened that door, Hermione."

She could feel her heart skipping a beat or two, and her lungs felt strangely small all of a sudden. With her head feeling disturbingly hot and dizzy she tried to catch at least one of the million thoughts that raced through her mind in that moment, but found herself frustratingly incapable of doing so.

"I didn't even mean to," Harry then added, speaking very softly. "It just happened."

Then he paused again, probably waiting for a response from her. Anything. But her tongue felt like a knot, her brain like a mess and her heart like a double bass drum of a Rock band, and no matter how much she wanted to do anything but remain silent, she ended up doing exactly that.

"What about you?" he finally asked her when nothing came from her.

"Me?" she blurted out, her brain now officially working against her tongue – or maybe the other way around. "I… I don't know about me."

If someone would have chosen this moment to present her with the award for saying the stupidest thing in the stupidest moment, she could not have blamed them. What was going on? She wasn't usually like this at all.

"What about your door?" he asked. "Is it open… or closed?"

She exhaled a jittery breath, her lips trembling. "I… I don't know," she heard herself say, although she wasn't sure she was actually speaking the words because there was so much noise in her head, like London traffic during rush hour with all the metaphorical cars being her different thoughts. She threw him a quick glance and saw him avert his eyes abashedly, and felt the immediate need to quickly add, "I'm sorry! I just feel a little overwhelmed right now. I guess none of this should even come as a surprise anymore, after everything that has happened this week and all those things we heard just this morning, but… patterns, charts and waveforms are one thing. Hearing you talk about this so openly is quite another."

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice subdued. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"Don't apologize," she told him gently. "You know I appreciate honesty and openness, and that's exactly what we have always been about, but this is… this is new. And it's strange and complicated. And… and hard to make sense of. And also a little scary, to tell you the truth."

"That doesn't sound too good," Harry said with a strained smile.

"I'm sorry," she said once more, feeling her heart go out to him even while she found herself unable to let it reach him without restraint. "For once I just don't know what to say or do, but only because this is so important. I don't want to say or do the wrong thing, but I realize that I may be doing exactly that right now. I just – I… I don't know."

"You don't know what?" he asked. "How you feel about me?"

"Harry…"

"It's a simple question."

"It's simple to ask," she said, "but much harder to answer."

"So you are not attracted to me that way," he flatly stated.

"Were you _there_ this morning when Professor Flitwick explained our libidinous energies to us?" Hermione asked him, giving him an incredulous look.

"Well, it wasn't entirely clear that he was talking about mutually… libidinous… stuff," Harry mumbled.

"I believe my subconscious would tend to disagree with that."

"What do you—" he began to ask in puzzlement, then his expression changed to one of comprehension within an instant. "Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa — wait! Are you saying—"

"I'm just trying to tell you that you are being unreasonable," Hermione cut him off, just a little too hastily to appear as casual as she had hoped she would.

Harry watched her intently for a moment, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, and then he slowly asked, "Did you have a specific kind of dream about me?"

Hermione blatantly avoided looking at him and tried very hard to will her cheeks to retain their natural color, although after this week she was no longer sure just what exactly their natural color actually was. And normally, she had always insisted, she was not the typical blushing girl; a self-proclaimed reputation that found itself in severe jeopardy these days.

After considering a whole lot of things she could possibly reply from a selection of very sophisticated and most dignified replies and retorts, she finally settled for the classical, rhetorical masterpiece of nonchalant acceptance rather than childish denial and said, accompanied by a very well executed shrug for good measure, "So?" and then, after one gloriously composed second of triumph, accusingly added, "You had one first!"

Harry snorted. "Which we have already talked about," he said, utterly unfazed. "So what about yours? Was it any good? I hope my dream-counterpart didn't disappoint."

She rolled her eyes. "Don't flatter yourself," she told him in a rebuff that was less than half serious. "It was entirely harmless."

"Harmless?" he asked, quite disappointed himself by all appearance. "That sounds boring."

"It was mostly about brooms, really," she casually said, hiding her impish smile behind the collar of her coat while echoes and images of all the harmlessness flashed by her mind's eye.

"Brooms?" Harry asked, genuinely confused.

"Yeah, well, I woke up just when it got really interesting."

"I know the feeling," he said with a bemused smile. "Frustrating, isn't it?"

She sighed and looked at him with a thoughtful expression, averting her eyes as soon as he got aware of her gaze and turned to meet it. "You have been conspicuously flirtatious for a while now, you know that?"

He knitted his forehead in puzzlement and seemed nearly offended in the face of this preposterous insinuation. "Flirtatious? Me?"

"Yes," she reaffirmed. "Mostly when you're tired, but I've been noticing it for quite some time."

"But… what?" he asked, his confusion not for show in the slightest. "Like, when?"

"Well, even excluding this admittedly crazy week, the last time it got really obvious was Sunday evening, if you must know. Before any of this happened."

"Sunday evening?" he asked disbelievingly. "In the common room? That was flirting?"

"Uhm, yes," she said. "I might not be an empirical luminary in the field and insecure enough to keep myself from believing anyone would willingly flirt with me of all people, but I understand enough of the theoretical part to assess that what we were doing back then and what we did right now most definitely falls into the general area of flirting."

"Right now, too?" he asked, almost shocked. "Huh. I had no idea."

Hermione couldn't suppress a slight chuckle at his inimitable innocence. "The weird thing is that I actually believe that."

Still struggling with that newfound insight into interpersonal dynamics, Harry shrugged his bafflement off as good as he could and instead went back to what seemed to be the matter at hand.

"And you say I have been doing that for a while now?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "I don't know when I consciously noticed it for the first time, but I would guess it must have been sometime during sixth year. Maybe around Christmas? I'm not sure, but it has become a more frequent phenomenon rather quickly. Especially when you are tired. You get strangely… frisky. And then, of course, just when I had gotten somewhat used to it, when I visited you in Privet Drive back in August and you told me my _feet_ were sexy, I was more than a little flummoxed to say the least."

Harry immediately felt that all too familiar warmth of shame spread on his cheeks. "Yeah, uh," he croaked, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I, uhm, I grew up in a cupboard and stuff. I'm all kinds of weird."

"Don't beat yourself up about it," she told him reassuringly, smiling amusedly. "I remember going to bed with what I can only assume must have been a rather stupid smile on my face, thinking, _'I have sexy feet,'_ and giggling into my pillow like, well, a girl."

"Always glad to entertain," Harry said in mock indignation, not quite able to banish the color from his cheeks. "So I guess that was flirting too, then?"

"Harry, I don't think it gets any more obvious than actually using the word _sexy_ when referring to another person, or one of their body parts. Some people would even go so far as to call that an invitation."

"Right," Harry said like a little boy who just got lectured by his primary school teacher. "But… I mean, bar the occasional, awkward foot compliment, correct me if I'm wrong – and as we have now sufficiently established, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to this; you cannot flirt on your own, now can you?"

"Well, there's always Malfoy and his mirror, of course, but it usually takes two, yes," Hermione conceded. "Though one can obviously refuse to partake in the exchange, as I have done on multiple occasions when Cormac McLaggen wouldn't leave me alone with his annoying advances. But I would never pretend that I didn't… reciprocate your very own – and very unwitting – flirtations. Although I never really took it to mean anything that actually… went into _that_ direction, you know? I just dismissed it as one of our harmless routines."

"Routine isn't a very romantic word," he said with a sly smile.

"Again," she replied, shooting him a telling look along the lines of '_You are doing it again'_, "I didn't see anything romantic about it."

"Because you couldn't?" he asked. "Or wouldn't?"

"I don't know," Hermione answered. "A little of both, maybe? Just like you, I guess. You said so yourself. It just wasn't like that. I was too set on what we were to give much thought to what we could be. Best friends forever, without so much as a hint of irony."

"But at the same time there was no one else, was there?" asked Harry. "In that specific sense, I mean. For either of us."

Hermione remained silent, so Harry continued his trail of thought. "Now that I mention it, if there's one thing we never really talked about, it's… well, all this stuff. Relationships. Other people. Crushes. You never asked me all that much about Cho and I didn't pry a lot about Viktor."

"Please, Viktor hardly counts as… anything, really," Hermione insisted. "Don't get me wrong, he was a lot nicer than you give him credit for and it was flattering to have someone notice me like that, but nothing ever happened."

"Yeah, I never took much of a liking to the guy, anyway," said Harry.

"Well, I don't remember being all that fond of Cho, either," she revealed. "Even though she's a perfectly nice girl."

Harry looked at her and waited for her to meet his eyes, and when she finally did he said, "Quite an enigma, huh?"

When she averted her eyes again with an unsteady smile, he turned to look out over the valley once more; towards the slowly setting sun, just above the top of the higher hills in the distance. Hermione was still trying to make sense of all the things that had just been said – anything, really – when she heard him exhale a long and heavy sigh, which pulled her back out of her inner turmoil.

"Let me go through this once more, Hermione," Harry began pensively, slowly. "We have been the closest of friends for six years now. We have been around each other all this time, been through thick and thin together, stood by each other through the most challenging of times and survived what each of us alone would probably have perished in. We trust and confide in each other, we lean and rely on each other. We have proven to be a good – a great team in pretty much everything we set out to do, and it all seems to come so natural to us that it might just be considered creepy by some. You're a girl and I'm a boy and we are, I suppose, both heterosexual. Neither of us really has had a real boy- or girlfriend, and neither of us has shown much interest in anyone else.

"The wizarding tabloids are writing about us in monthly columns and have, to my knowledge, slowly but surely dropped most of the other girls they used to randomly associate me with. More significantly, all our friends either make suggestive remarks or talk about us as if we already were a couple. Ron has called us an _old couple_ on more than one occasion. I wouldn't be surprised if Fred and George were conducting bets on when we'll finally hook up. The professors keep looking at us with those knowing smirks. Even Snape, in his own, loathsome way, seems to know more than us.

"We've been having incidents of more or less intentional flirtations for quite a while now, apparently, and this week we have begun teleporting into each other's beds for some mysterious reason. We've both had sexual dreams about each other. We have both openly stated that we find each other physically attractive. Then, just this morning, science let us know that there are indeed libidinous dynamics between us, and, on a side note, that there are also some crazy amounts of affinity going on between us, whatever exactly that is now. So, to sum it all up, we are basically best friends who have most wondrously discovered that they also fancy each other."

He paused and looked at her in silence for a moment, searching her face for anything, for everything, while she held her gaze directed downwards. Then, his voice so soft it nearly had to be carried by the wind for half the distance to her ears, he said, "So what's the hiccup?"

Slowly she raised her head to look up at him and could barely keep herself from wincing when she found him standing so close to her. Her memory instantly took her back to Wednesday night, when they had last stood right in front of each other so closely, not unlike right now, in the locker room. Back then, of course, she had so clumsily ruined the moment with some stupid excuse she didn't even want to remember. Sure, the locker room wasn't exactly the perfect setting for her romantic cravings – even though, apparently, her subconscious tended to disagree with that – but standing on a bridge over a valley with an outlook over a lake glistening warmly in the light of a setting sun, that excuse wasn't really applicable right now.

She found herself captivated by his haunting gaze, trapped inside his strikingly green eyes; two dark emeralds boring right into the very core of her being. Perusing her. Exposing her, embracing her. Inviting and enticing her.

_Kiss him. Just kiss him right now. You know you want to. And you know he wants to as well, so stop doubting it already. Why not do it? Be spontaneous. Be impulsive. Surprise him! Bewitch him! You _are_ a witch, for Merlin's sake! Do something!_

"You are not sure, are you?" he then asked her in a near-whisper, not taking his eyes off of her even while she succumbed to her inner struggle.

"I'm so sorry," she feebly said, her voice so imbued with emotion and sincerity it was frail under the weight of it all, on the verge of failing her. "I… I just…"

"It's okay," he whispered soothingly, and as she felt his arms around her she looked up again, searching his face for the forgiveness she could never give herself and finding it in his weak but honest smile and the gleam of affection in his eyes.

"Gosh, this feels so surreal," her most immediate thought escaped her lips without intent, and when he looked at her in wonder she went on to explain, "All of it. Everything that happened this week, every bizarre moment we spent in a room with only one or more professors as company. Every night I fell asleep wondering if I would wake up with you right next to me again. Every minute I spent pondering what it all meant, searching myself for answers to questions I had never really asked before."

She paused for a moment, her eyes flickering back and forth between his own. "And this," she breathed. "This right here. This very moment between us. To even imagine anything like this to ever happen was beyond what my mind deemed reasonable to do. To speak these words, to share these looks. To touch like this. You and me, after all this time. One part of me wonders if this is really us, and the other knows that this is exactly what we've always been. And both together serve to make it impossible for me as a whole to believe that any of this is really happening."

"We could pinch each other, if you want," Harry quipped, making her smile in return, short-lived as it was.

"Please know that this is not about me questioning my feelings for you," she told him affectionately, her hands resting lightly on his chest. "I believe those should be quite clear to you by now even without Professor Flitwick ogling them through that oversized eyepiece of his. This is about me being insanely unsure of… what to do. I mean, do you not worry at all about what might become of us if we were to… to go this way and then fail?"

Harry sighed at that and let his eyes wander over the scenery a little. "The thought might have crossed my mind, I suppose," he finally admitted with some reluctance. "But I don't care much for it, because I wouldn't intend to fail."

"Who does, though?" she asked him. "And yet it always happens all around. Everyone can say _I do_ in the naivety of the moment, but how many hold true to that? I have been ridiculously, entirely uncharacteristically certain for years now that we, as friends, would never part ways; that I would always be there for you and you for me. What could come between us? But a platonic friendship, especially one like ours, has much higher chances of permanence than relationships with entirely different dynamics involved. Dynamics we know nothing about.

"What if they were to change us for the worse? What if we were to try this only to find that we erred in thinking this was the way to go? What if these feelings are deceiving us? Professor Flitwick seems to be able to do a lot of things with that apparatus of his, but he cannot foresee the future. No more than Professor Trelawney can. What if it's just a fleeting thing? What if it burns out? And what will be left of us if it should? Do you think we could recover from that; that our friendship would be salvageable from the wreckage of a failed relationship?

"Because I don't. I think it would cut too deep; leave wounds too severe to ever heal. We are not the kind of people who can go on like nothing ever happened. We are not the kind of people who can pretend. I have no doubt we would be glorious in our wuthering heights, yet no less devastating in our fall. And no matter how much I might yearn for it by now, tempted and tormented by its vague silhouette, I am not sure our friendship is worth the risk. The one is a possibility, the other a certainty. The one I might despair not to have, yet the other I could not bear to lose."

She looked at him expectantly – just a little exhausted after her heartfelt monologue – and waited for his response. He looked away with his head turned to the side, where the red sun was finally beginning to disappear behind the hills. Then he took a very deep breath.

"Damn," he sighed. "That's a toughie."

Hermione couldn't help but eject a laugh at the way he said that and she could see his lips were curling into a smile of their own.

"So," she said after a moment's reprieve, "you don't have a solution for this conundrum either?"

"No," he answered, only then turning to face her again and at first he seemed to be all serious. Then, however, his lips turned up once more at one corner, into one of his lopsided smiles, and with that secret glint in his eyes it nearly seemed just a little mischievous. "But the day's not yet done," he said, "and you have yet to receive your presents."

So puzzled was Hermione that she couldn't do more than furrow her eyebrows, even while he broke their embrace and slowly began to step away from her, walking backwards – blatantly amused for some reason and almost too smug for her taste.

"I'll see you at the party," he said with a wink, and then he turned around and walked away with quickened steps, leaving Hermione standing rather dumbfounded in her spot.

And then, of all possible things, the first conscious thought that formed into any kind of clarity in her mind was,

_Party? Oh, no…_

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

Huh. No Shakespeare. No pop-cultural references. Nothing.

What a boring chapter.

Okay, maybe I'm desperate here, but how about...

_Hermione's spiritless greeting between "Hi" and "Hey":_ Personally, I was again thinking of _Friends_. Ross has that way of saying "Hi" that robs all those within earshot of all their will to live, which I actually consider to be the perfect greeting for most occasions.

_Orwellian nightmare:_ The term _Orwellian_, based on the great George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair), describes... pretty much everything that can go wrong with human society according to his own philosophy, most prominently featured in his influential novel _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. Where Big Brother is watching you, the Orwellian nightmare has come true. (Hint: present-day real world is not far off.)


	9. Equilibrium

**Author's Note:** This is it, my dear readership. This ninth chapter is my story's closure, its final act, the last stage, the… you get the idea. But it's also the second longest chapter, so don't think for one moment there's nothing left to say. And then, of course, there's also the epilogue. So, actually, this is not the end quite yet. Then what am I talking about, you ask? Well, I have no idea. I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I'm saying.

Since an ending can either make or break a whole story, I guess I should really hope you'll like this one. Even though it's not the ending-ending. But it is an ending. Of sorts.

* * *

**• Chapter IX •**

**Equilibrium**

"**SURPRISE!**" more than two dozen voices both male and female yelled the moment she stepped into the Three Broomsticks; the booming voice of Hagrid drowning all others. Standing behind the gathered group of people the happy half-giant held his arms outstretched to his sides, looking as if he were about to crush them all in one uncompromisingly heartfelt hug. He didn't, though. But he could have.

Above their heads, written right into the air in glittering sparks of red and golden light it read _'Happy 18__th__ Birthday, Hermione!'_ and the whole interior of the pub was richly decorated all over, with balloons and streamers in all colors and the whole palette of birthday party clichés that everybody knew Hermione was _so_ fond of.

"Nyeah," she then awkwardly said in response to this most surprising of surprises, forcing a somewhat constrained smile onto her lips while quickly scanning the faces of all those in front of her.

Besides Hagrid and Madam Rosmerta there were all of her seventh year housemates, and also Ginny and her current boyfriend – whatever his name was – from sixth year in addition to that. From Ravenclaw there were Luna, of course, and also Parvati's twin sister Padma, Declan MacManus and his girlfriend Siobhan. From Hufflepuff, Ernie Macmillan, Hannah Abbott, Justin Finch-Fletchley and Susan Bones had come. Then there were also Angelina Johnson – George's girlfriend –, Katie Bell and Alicia Spinnet, as well as Lee Jordan. For Hermione, the most surprising thing – besides the sheer number of people, that is – was noticing that there was also a girl from Slytherin amongst them, but before she could even begin to really wonder about that, Fred and George, the industrious orchestrators of the whole affair, stepped forward and looked at her suspiciously.

"You are not half as surprised as a surprise party demands of the surprised person to be surprised," George critically observed, and his twin brother's narrowed eyes switched to Ron, who stood next to Hermione after having entered behind her with an air of innocence about him.

"You whistle-blowing snitch!" Fred accused him bluntly.

"Back off, bro!" Ron protested. "It wasn't me."

"Oh, really?" George challenged him doubtfully.

"Then who was it?" Fred demanded to know.

"You want me to sell out the sellout you just accused me of being?" their younger brother asked them with one eyebrow raised.

"Thereby making the sellout of you we already knew you were all along," said George.

"And thus being right after all," added Fred.

"Clearly a win-win kind of situation," George remarked.

"For us and us," Fred concluded.

"Okay, Weasley-overload," Hermione interrupted their up-tempo exchange with her hands raised in front of her.

George grinned broadly at her. "I see somebody wants to get the party started, huh?" he said, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

"Badly," Hermione answered flatly.

"Oh, come on, you incorrigible party pooper," said Fred, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her towards the much dreaded center of attention. And then, practically shouting to address everyone in the pub at once, added, "Let's get this party started, folks! This fine lady can't wait to rock the house!"

And his twin brother joined him in yelling, "There are piles of presents, barrels of Butterbeer, flagons of Firewhiskey, more pumpkin pie than you can puke, half the inventory of Honeydukes and some special extras from our very own selection at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes – free of charge for your convenience. Safety not guaranteed."

"Free beer for all!" Fred shouted right after that, then added under his breath, "The last one sober pays."

Madam Rosmerta buried her face in her hands at that, probably beginning to doubt that agreeing to host a party organized by Fred and George Weasley had been the best of ideas and wondering if her beloved establishment would still be all that established after this night.

Within seconds Hermione found herself right in the middle of it all; shaking hands and braving hugs from more people than she usually preferred to touch within a whole year, all of them congratulating her with smiles and laughter and all kinds of niceties. Naturally, her charming female housemates – with Lavender Brown leading the way – were right in their element. While putting on a fake smile the likes of which had rarely been seen from her, Hermione couldn't help but think that whoever was responsible for this year's guest list should really be the first person to be cut from next year's guest list.

But not all was lost, since she actually liked most of those who were there. But to her, even nice people could get too much to take when surrounding her in large numbers, so she was somewhat trapped between not wanting to be ungrateful and wanting to go hide under some table and read a nice book until it was all over, which – understandably, if regrettably – might not have been looked at as the most appropriate behavior for the presentee.

When the human throng around her finally dispersed a little and she found some space to breath, she noticed the pile of presents George had referred to, and its sheer enormity took her breath right away again.

"This is too much, guys," she said, helplessly looking around. "This is all too much."

"Wait till you see all the crap inside," Fred told her good-naturedly. "It really looks better when it's all wrapped up so nicely."

"Besides," added George, "there's also a bunch of presents that arrived per mail just this morning. From your parents, Lupin and Tonks and half the Order, the rest of our family with the smallest one probably being from Percy…"

"Still," Hermione insisted. "It's just too much."

"But we wanted to honor your Muggle heritage and traditions," George told her, and Hermione knitted her eyebrows in confusion.

"And what traditions would that be, exactly?" she asked warily. "Excessive consumerism and boundless hedonism?"

"Sure sounds like a party to me," said Fred with a shrug. "But isn't there a thing called sweet eighteen or something in your culture?"

Hermione pursed her lips. "First of all," she said, "that's more of a North American kind of thing. And secondly, it's sixteen. Not eighteen."

"What?" asked George, almost shocked. "Are you telling us we're two years late? Damn, we should've invited more people."

And thus the party went its way, with groups of people occupying either some of the tables or the stools at the bar, or just standing around somewhere; chatting, drinking, laughing and trying their luck with some of those _special extras_ from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Others actually used the additional space that having the Three Broomsticks mostly to themselves tonight brought with it to dance to flute, pipe and fiddle; Seamus fulfilling the function of a DJ and putting on good, old Irish folk for the most part. One of the advantages amongst wizarding culture was that not all their tastes had gone down the tubes yet.

Madam Rosmerta, of course, did her usual thing, although tonight she had Neville and Hannah voluntarily doing most of the work behind the bar. Fred and George went hither and thither, causing laughter wherever they deemed it lacking. At one table, board games were played while Luna seemed to have a lot of fun chasing after balloons. At some point, her eyes fixed on the balloon she kept pushing into the air ahead of her with her fingertips, she bumped straight into Ron, who managed to keep his balance while also holding on to Luna, who otherwise would probably have fallen flat to the ground. Clumsily she steadied herself and then looked up at Ron, who looked right back at her with a crooked smile.

Hermione, leaning against a wooden pillar, was watching the scene amusedly from a distance when someone approached her, taking her attention away from this peculiar incident. It was not the person who would actually have been more interesting than Ron's and Luna's chance encounter.

"Hey, Hermione," Cormac McLaggen greeted her with a toothy grin, which Hermione reciprocated by pursing her lips into something that might or might not have resembled a smile. "Nice party."

She nodded, her lips still tightly pressed together. At least now she knew that Ron most definitely had not been responsible for the guest list, which was kind of ironic considering he would probably have been more suitable for that task than leading her to Hogsmeade for _no apparent reason_, which had been even more subtle than his way of getting her to go to the bridge earlier today. One just couldn't help but love the bloke. A fact that Luna seemed to come rather close to finding out about right now…

"Eighteen, huh?" Cormac then said, forcing Hermione to tear her eyes away from her two friends again, who still remained right in front of each other. "Same as me."

And that was pretty much the sum of all they had in common. The guy really knew how to work his angles.

"It sure feels totally different from seventeen," Hermione remarked ironically.

"Tell me about it," Cormac agreed, entirely oblivious to all the irony in the world. "I mean, don't get me wrong, seventeen can be tough, but at eighteen… it's like real life actually starts, you know? The serious stuff. It's rough-and-tumble, believe me."

Hermione, squinting her eyes, did something between nodding and shaking her head, unsure of where exactly to go with it. "Right," she reluctantly chose to agree at least superficially.

"It's like, when there's been an accident," Cormac continued with no small amount of self-importance, apparently further encouraged by Hermione's enthusiastic response, "and you just know that you gotta do something… because nobody else can, you know? Because… you _know_."

Hermione looked a bit muddled, to say the least; somehow raising her eyebrows even while keeping her eyes narrowed into slits. "What about Mediwizards?"

"Hm?" Cormac made just as if he hadn't heard her at all, taking a sip from his bottle of Butterbeer.

"People who are actually trained to help with medical emergencies?" she asked rhetorically.

"Oh, right. Sure, sure," he answered, and Hermione wondered if he was maybe having a conversation of his own inside his head. "Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate you more privately. You know, away from the kids and the rumpus and all that. I need the quiet sometimes, you know? To think and… and really get some thoughts done, you know? It's hard sometimes."

"Indubitably," Hermione concisely agreed, taking a sip from her glass as a disturbingly suicidal part of her seemed to wish that her pumpkin juice were poisoned right now. Then her rational voice told her that it would be more sensible to wish that Cormac's Butterbeer were poisoned. And then her moral voice told her that neither would be fine as well. Sadly, before any other voices inside her head could speak up, Cormac did.

"So, listen," he said, "you and me, I'm thinking we got something going here, you know? I can tell you're different from the rest and I like all that deep stuff you're all about. It's, like, totally mature. And I see that connection between us, you know? Like last year it was there and now it's still there. Gotta mean something, right? Surely you see that, too."

"I'm not quite sure I do, actually," Hermione replied carefully, inconspicuously searching her surroundings for possible assistance – or maybe an emergency exit.

"Come on," said Cormac with a smug smile. "You got a real opportunity here."

Self-control and composure were Hermione's mantra of the moment. Surely Cormac would not want to become the accident only he alone could help with.

"I can't tell you just how tempted I am right now to do something I would probably regret in the morning," she told him calmly. "But I won't."

"Why not?" he asked, mistaking her meaning for the wrong kind of innuendo – as expected. "There isn't someone else, is there?"

Just as her mind assembled her usual routine answer to all questions of that kind in what was a reflex that had been nurtured by truth over many years now, her eyes, while lazily scanning the room, were caught by a pair of emerald green amongst the crowd, intercepting her thought before it ever reached her lips.

"Actually," she heard herself absentmindedly say, brown still locked with green, "I believe there is."

Cormac looked mildly surprised at that and for once was attentive enough to follow her eyes. "Who, Potter? So the rumors are true?" he asked, then shrugged his shoulders. "Is it serious?"

A barely audible sigh escaped Hermione's lips. "It could never be anything but," she then answered decisively. "Excuse me."

And without so much as deigning him another look, Hermione stepped away from a somewhat disgruntled Cormac, drawn straight towards the eyes that held her in their spell.

"I need your help."

Hermione stopped short, her vision suddenly blocked by a striped shirt. She looked up in irritation, and whatever expression she had on her face apparently served to make Ron retreat a step to what he deemed a safer distance, while somewhere behind them Cormac McLaggen was already looking for somebody else to enlighten with his profound insights into the hardships of human existence.

"Whoa!" Ron said with his hands raised in front of him. "Maybe not."

When he was just about to turn around on the spot, Hermione came to her senses and shook the frustration from her features, telling him to wait – which he apprehensively complied with like a fugitive who just got told to _freeze!_ by his armed pursuer. Seeing the look on his face Hermione couldn't help but chuckle.

"I'm sorry," she was quick to say, "You just caught me on the hop, that's all. What do you need my help with?"

Ron hesitated for a moment, eying her skeptically. "Well," he slowly answered, "I just wanted to talk to you about something."

"Then let's," she said, motioning towards the table next to them where Hagrid sat with a huge mug of ale in front of him. While Ron moved past her and sat down next to the half-giant with his back towards Hermione, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder before following him, seeking those green eyes amongst the crowd to no avail. With a sigh she took her seat across from Ron and looked at him expectantly. When he didn't show any sign of even the slightest intention to speak up, she tried to encourage him with as little impatience as possible.

"Spill it out, Ron!" she urged him accordingly.

"Well," he replied with some hesitation, fidgeting around with his hands while Hagrid watched him from the side with increasing amusement. "You see, something just happened."

"You mean how Luna bumped into you and then you caught her in your arms and then you guys had a little moment there?" Hermione was quick to get ahead of him, and seeing his flabbergasted expression she simply added, "I saw you."

"Oh," he said to that. "Right. Okay. So, uh, what do you think I should do?"

"About what?"

"About Luna."

"What about Luna?"

"You're making me nervous," Ron complained. "Why are you in such a rush? If you gotta go to the loo or something, don't let me keep you."

Hermione gave off a dramatic sigh. "To pee or not to pee," she mused, deeply philosophical. "Seriously, though. It's fine. And it's not the loo you kept me from. So please, by all means, continue."

Ron needed a moment to gather his thoughts. "It was just that kind of a moment, I guess," he then began, staring blankly at the table. "I mean, nothing really happened. But now I find myself wondering if I would like something to happen, if you take my meaning."

"It's quite impossible not to," Hermione answered. "So where's the problem?"

"Well, I just don't think I've really thought about her like that before," he explained. "I always liked her in a general sense and I suppose I thought she could be pretty pretty, but… she's also… well, Luna, you know?"

"Uh-huh," she replied knowingly. "And now what?"

When Ron just kept playing with the sleeves of his shirt and strictly avoided looking at her, she added, "You want me to tell you what to do, don't you?"

Immediately he looked up at her with a glint of hope in his eyes. "A little, maybe?"

Hermione rolled her eyes at him with a smile curling up her lips.

"I won't make these decisions for you, Ron," she told him, not so much sternly as just sincerely.

"Will you at least tell me if you know anything about how she thinks about me?" he asked pleadingly. "Or if she does at all?"

"Oh, so that's how it's going to be," Hermione declared with a hint of disapproval in her voice. "You want to know your chances before doing anything."

"Rejection's never nice," Ron meekly replied, drawing invisible circles on the tabletop.

"Are you interested in her, or not?" Hermione asked him straightforwardly.

"I… I dunno," he stammered, "but it seemed like she kinda fancied me, so—"

"You either are or you aren't, Ronald," she admonished him irritably. "If you want to be an opportunistic arse about these things, don't be it with a friend of mine. Now one might very easily imagine to find Luna cruising across North America in a Volkswagen van with a psychedelic paintjob, celebrating free love, LSD and STDs, but I can tell you that she is surprisingly old-fashioned about these things – if that's what you want to call it – and while I want nothing but the best for you, I don't want her to get hurt either. So don't play any games. You are either interested in her as an actual person or just in the idea of getting laid by whoever is willing to do the deed. For the latter you might as well get back together with Lavender."

Ron turned to Hagrid in desperate search for help, but the half-giant merely shrugged his shoulders, said, "Yep, that's wha' she'll do t'yeh," and took a large gulp of ale. "By the way, 'mione," he continued afterwards, "I've finished me letter jus' this afternoon. I actually got it with me, if yer wan' ter have a look, maybe. 'Course it still has ter be translated."

"Sure," she said, taking another inconspicuous glance or two around the room, yet finding neither a pair of green eyes nor that familiar mess of raven black hair. "Let me see."

With Ron watching the exchange with a rather befuddled expression, Hagrid handed over a crumpled piece of parchment to Hermione, who straightened it as much as she could on the table in front of her before proceeding to read it attentively; Hagrid watching her anxiously for the whole duration. Once finished, she raised her head and regarded her semi-gigantic friend with an appreciative look.

"That's really nice, Hagrid," she told him cordially. "Honestly. It's poignant, it's sincere. It's adorably clumsy. It's perfect."

"I jus' tried ter do as yeh told me," he mumbled abashedly, his cheeks flushed pink to match his nose. "T'be me an' all that."

"And that's exactly what makes it so great," Hermione proudly said. "I tell you what. I'll translate this over the weekend and then you'll be able to send it on its way first thing on Monday. We can always come back to your French lessons at a later point. Right now, I think, the lady just has to read this. Maybe we'll send her both versions."

With the impossible seemingly happening, Hagrid's cheeks turned an even deeper shade of pink at that, although he now looked just as touched and happy as he looked embarrassed and tipsy. "Thank yeh, Hermione," he said, his eyes glistening wetly. "Really. I don't know wha' else t'say. Thank yeh an' happy birthday!"

And to that he raised his enormous mug and then took another mighty gulp of his definitely not nonalcoholic beverage. For once, however, he wasn't all that insufferable even though he was already a little more than a little bit drunk.

"Yeah, well," Ron suddenly piped up, "while that's all mighty fine and precious… what about me? I still don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do here."

"I believe you still have a question to answer," Hermione told him coolly, her eyes once more flickering around the pub.

"Well, I don't know, okay?" he answered with some frustration. "I just don't know her well enough. And yes, the fact that she seemed to be interested in me got me thinking about it. But that doesn't mean I want to take advantage of her. At least not after you told me not to. I might not know if I see us as girlfriend-boyfriend stuff, but what I do know is that I would like to find out. Is that so bad?"

Hermione scrutinized him intently for a few seconds and Ron seemed to shrink a little under her gaze, until at last her features softened and a warm smile crept onto her lips.

"No," she said. "It's not. Actually, it's perfectly fine. I know you have a good heart, Ron. It just seems that you have to be reminded sometimes. If you want to find out how you feel about Luna and how she feels about you, then I would strongly suggest you stop wasting your time talking to me and get back to her. She might just be waiting. Especially considering, as you might be interested to know, she once said that you are the most lovable bumbling berk she has ever met."

Ron didn't exactly break into jubilation at that and instead looked rather confused at her, unsure of what to make of that revelation.

"She said that very dreamily," Hermione therefore added. "It's a good thing. Trust me."

Then her eyes involuntarily switched to a distant point just over Ron's right shoulder, and that tingling sensation came back over her when she saw the person she had been searching for the entire time open the entrance door and step outside into the dark; gone without even seeing her. Ron, taking notice, looked over his shoulder to see what she was suddenly looking so perplexed for and immediately turned around again.

"Where's he going?" Hermione asked, a bit worriedly so. "And why would he just leave? He hasn't even talked to me yet and we barely saw each other."

"Probably just going for some fresh air," Ron answered, casually shrugging his shoulders.

For a moment Hermione remained silent, although the way she bit her lower lip while the index finger of her right hand tapped incessantly onto the tabletop betrayed her inner soliloquy.

"I should go after him," she finally stated. "Just to make sure he's okay, I mean."

Ron risked a quick glance at his watch as inconspicuously as he could, which of course made it look very suspicious. Hermione, however, was so preoccupied that she hardly noticed anything around her at all.

"Now that you mention it," he then said conversationally, reaching into the inside pocket of his shirt, "I have something for you."

That, at the very least, got him Hermione's attention, who looked at him with her eyebrows furrowed in puzzlement as he handed her a plain white envelope.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A plain white envelope," Ron answered, earning a scowl from Hermione.

"And who is it from?" she asked, otherwise ignoring his banter. "You?"

Ron merely shrugged his shoulders once more.

"You are one smooth criminal today," she told him, shaking her head while beginning to open the envelope with nimble fingers; careful not to rip the paper. Within seconds she held a piece of parchment in her hands, folded once right in the middle. When she folded it out her brow furrowed even more. She turned the parchment to its other side and then around again, until finally she looked up at Ron with an expression on her face that – to his barely concealed delight – was as clueless as he had ever seen her.

"This is blank," she said, so confused that she didn't even find the energy to scoff at Ron's annoying amusement.

"I think you're supposed to look harder," he told her. "You know, all that magic stuff we're all about."

Now she at least glared at him for a second before turning her attention back to the parchment. "Fine," she grumbled, proceeding to stare at the piece of paper once again; empty as it was and still remained. After a few seconds of staring at the most interesting surface structure of the paper, hardly blinking at all, a sigh escaped her lips as her patience faltered. Just when she was about to complain, she forced herself to keep her focus instead, and sure enough, after another moment of intense staring, black ink began to appear on the surface; thin lines at first, but quick to expand, slowly but surely taking the shape of neatly written letters, until finally it read:

_To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle._

The words took their time to really sink in and reach Hermione's conscious mind, her innermost self, and while they did a strange sensation overwhelmed her from within with increasing intensity, just as if everything that made up who she was shifted somehow and yet remained in place and perfect stillness.

"So who's it from?" she then heard Ron ask as if from some great distance. "You recognize the handwriting?"

Slowly coming back to the here and now, Hermione still did not take her eyes away from the writing. "No, it's not his own," she then said most pensively, her voice soft and subdued. "But I do recognize its meaning."

Only then she raised her head and glanced at Ron and Hagrid in turn, who watched her with looks of eager expectancy. Under different circumstances she might have laughed at the expressions on their faces, but right now her mind was racing so fast only her heart seemed able to challenge it and situational humor wasn't exactly on the forefront of her many thoughts.

"I need to go," she suddenly declared, her eyes flickering back and forth between anywhere and elsewhere.

She rose from her chair abruptly and its wooden legs gave a sharp creaking noise as they scratched over the floor beneath, then she seemed frozen still for a moment.

"Right," she then said with a nod, and nobody – including Hermione – could tell who exactly she was talking to.

When she was just halfway through her first step, Ron spoke up with his eyebrows raised. "You'll want to take that with you," he told her, reaching over and pushing the discarded piece of parchment nearer to her end of the table. When she looked quizzically first at the letter and then at him, a sly smile played around one corner of his lips as he said, "Trust me."

After no more than a second of hesitation, Hermione gingerly grabbed the parchment and with one last look at Ron and Hagrid – half sheepish, half suspicious – turned and left, heading straight for the exit with the two men's eyes following her. Once the door fell shut behind her, the both of them turned back to the table again in unintentional simultaneity.

"So," said Ron. "What do you think, big guy? Will they finally work it all out this time?"

"Well," answered Hagrid, taking his time to relish another gulp of his favorite ale in the world, which seemed rather appropriate right now, "if those two don't, I don't think there's any hope for the rest o' us."

~•~

Stepping out into the night, the first thought that came to Hermione's mind was that it probably hadn't been the best of ideas to leave her coat behind. The sun was long gone by now and it hadn't exactly been warm to begin with at any time during the day, and while it was far from freezing it wasn't what she would call comfortable either. Her priorities, however, were of a different nature in that moment, so she let the door to the Three Broomsticks fall shut behind her as she stepped into the main street of Hogsmeade; sparsely lit by a few street lamps here and there and the warm light coming from the pub and a few other buildings, though most windows were dark at this time of day.

She looked from left to right and back again, her eyes only beginning to adjust to her darker surroundings, yet she was still quite sure that there was not a single person to be seen for the whole length of the street that she could see in either direction. Stepping into the middle of the cobblestone street, she found herself indecisive; torn between the two ways she could chose and frustrated that she didn't have even the slightest hint of information to base her decision on. The only thing she could do was to choose randomly, and that was something she was really not fond of by any stretch of the imagination.

Where could he have gone? Evidently he hadn't just gone out to catch a breath of fresh air, since the air was quite fresh right where she was, as she was unable not to notice with a slight chill crawling up her arms, which she then crossed in front of her chest. Maybe she should have just gone back inside to wait for him to return. He would, wouldn't he? Surely he wouldn't just leave without speaking a word to her? But where then had he so suddenly gone off to – and at this time? Where, if not just back to the castle? She couldn't exactly hold it against him if he had just had enough of the party. He could have taken her with him, though.

Heaving a sigh of frustration she let her arms drop to her sides again, and only when the piece of paper slipped from her hand and dropped to the ground with the faintest of thuds did she realize that she had had it with her the whole time. Swiftly she scooped it right up again, and when she unfolded it she was surprised to find it empty once more. On a rather silly impulse she shook the parchment a little, as if that would bring the letters back. Why had Ron told her to take it with her, anyway? It wasn't exactly helping.

Lost in thought she kept her eyes on its surface, although she was hardly aware of where she was looking, until after a few seconds something in her field of vision changed and her eyes quickly refocused. And indeed, black ink began to reappear on the paper, just in the same fashion as it had before; only this time – as it quickly became clear even before the writing was finished – the resulting message was different:

_Follow that pretty nose of yours, then!_

That left her even more muddled than the previous one, and for more than one reason. Its meaning wasn't half as clear to her even though it was twice as explicit a sentence, and having her nose called pretty was quite a thing to process for itself. Absentmindedly she slowly went up and down the bridge of her nose with her index finger until she realized what she was doing and then abruptly stopped, even though there was no one around to give her a justifiably quizzical look. She cleared her throat a little nonetheless.

Then she looked around once more, but this time – wittingly or not – she sniffed the air, thereby testing if the message could possibly be meant in a literal way and feeling rather silly for it. Whatever she could have hoped to smell, the cool air was fresh and invigorating, but altogether free of any discernible scent. So much for the use of her _pretty_ _nose_.

Usually not quite that quick to quail, Hermione felt a sense of helplessness come over her, and closing her eyes with a sigh she let her head drop and remained like that for little while, concentrating on her soft and steady breathing and the quiet sounds of the night; the busy hubbub from the Three Broomsticks reaching her only faintly out here.

When she opened her eyes again with the intention of trying another glance at the letter she still held in her hand, she caught a glimpse of something strange from the corner of her eye – a bluish light on the ground right next to her – and instead turned to look at whatever it might be. Contrary to any expectations she could have possibly had, the source turned out to be the outline of a single foot, glowing brightly on the ground all in blue. While still quite puzzling in and of itself, this at least appeared to be rather unambiguous in its meaning.

Looking around to see if anyone had taken notice of this peculiar sight in the middle of the otherwise barely illuminated street, she found that, in fact, no one seemed to care. Knowing a thing or two about magic, she inferred that maybe she was the only one who could actually see the glowing footprint. But at any rate, there didn't really seem to be anything left to do but one thing, so she did what the footprint suggested to her and tentatively stepped right into it with her own left foot, surprised to find that it fit quite perfectly with only a little of the blue light still visible as it emerged from under her shoe.

At first relieved when nothing happened, then elated when another footprint appeared slightly ahead of the first one, thinking of her nose she whispered to herself, "Figuratively, then," and gingerly put her right foot onto this newly formed shape; equally glowing as the first one. With every step she took a new print appeared in front of the previous one and the faster she began to walk as her confidence increased, the faster the footprints were to appear; the glowing trail she left behind her slowly fading into nothingness. Following what seemed very much to be her own footsteps, Hermione couldn't help but feel like she was walking a path she unknowingly had already travelled.

Along the main street she followed the trail, passing by the quirky houses of Hogsmeade; the closed shops and the homes of those that lived their lives here, far away from Muggle civilization. A few windows here and there were still warmly lit in yellow and orange, but Hermione was too busy following the glowing footsteps through the night to catch many glimpses of anything else. So focused was she on the ground that she only noticed how the trail had just lead her off its main path, around a lamp post and then right back into the middle of the street for no apparent reason when she was already halfway around the lamp. Shaking her head with a chuckle, she continued undeterred.

Shortly after that absurd detour, Hermione – walking rather swiftly by now – actually ended up overstepping the footprints, when at some point they made a bend into an alleyway that in a different town might have had an ominous quality about it, yet here in Hogsmeade made no one even think twice. And so it was without hesitation that Hermione made a few steps backwards and then turned to get back onto the footprints, following them right through the alley and out again on the other side. There the cobblestone ended in line with the last houses, the road continuing in a less orderly and muddier fashion with wooden fences to both its sides and the view opening up before her, which of course she hardly noticed at all with her eyes fixed on the ground.

Then came a crossroads, where the luminous footprints led her to the left and even without seeing the corresponding sign she suddenly became aware of where they seemed to be headed, even though it had been many years since she had walked this path herself. Walking in the pitch black shadows of the trees that stood on either side, their boughs reaching over the narrow pathway and meeting in the middle above it, the bluely glowing footprints were now the only thing she could see as they led her through the darkness towards one single spot of light that soon appeared at the far end of the road.

Hermione wasn't exactly eager on telling anyone, but she actually was a little relieved when she was finally leaving the shadows of the trees behind and stepped into the cone of light surrounding the lamp post. Rationality only goes so far against humanity's most primal fear.

With a slight hop she stepped onto the wooden planks, and still following the trail of footprints took a right turn and walked past two of Hogsmeade's boathouses and then, turning left, in between the second and the third. After a few meters she stepped out from the shadows, the wide lake opening up before her under the starry night sky with the castle looming high above on the rocky cliffs on the opposite shore, many of its uncounted windows alit with candlelight; a sight eyes forever wondered to behold, as if walking through a waking dream in awe and disbelief.

No longer than a few seconds did Hermione remain enchanted, however, before she become aware of one single oil lamp burning near the end of one of the multiple jetties reaching out over the calm, dark water. Next to it lay a single boat, swaying softly up and down on the gentle waves. And then there was one human figure, kneeling on the planks with its back to her, by all appearance quite busy with something.

Drawn towards it quite instinctively, Hermione walked the last few meters across the softly creaking planks without paying much attention to the footprints anymore, and when she finally took one last turn to the right and stepped onto the very jetty she had fixed her eyes on, the last two footprints vanished beneath her feet, their blue glow fading away and leaving no trace behind.

Hermione remained still for a moment and took one deep breath before going on, slowly approaching the very, very mysterious person ahead of her.

"What are you doing there?" she asked him with a bemused smile, coming to a halt a few steps away from him.

He calmly turned around, making Hermione wonder if once more he had recognized her by her walk. Was she entirely incapable of startling him at least a little?

"Well," he answered, gesturing to his unfinished work with his hand, "right now I'm trying to loosen this ridiculous knot Hagrid apparently meant to keep this boat tied to this bloody bollard with until the earth gets swallowed by the sun eventually."

Hermione arched an eyebrow at him. "Don't you have your wand with you?"

"Yeah, uh," he began, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment, "I think that only made it worse, actually."

Hermione's eyebrow went a little higher at that, then she gestured towards his wand. "Would you mind letting me try?"

Shrugging his shoulders Harry stood up and pulled out his wand he kept in a thin leather holster at the right side of his belt and handed it to Hermione, who pointed it directly at the knot without losing any time or words and no more than a second later, with a flimsy, buzzing string of white light emerging from the tip of the wand and winding its way through the rope, said knot was no more.

Feigning indignation Harry took his wand back from Hermione, who already held it dutifully towards him, and rolling his eyes mumbled, "Magic is so lazy."

With a smile Hermione replied, "Lazy wasn't exactly the first word to come to my mind when I received your letter and then followed a trail of glowing footprints through the streets of Hogsmeade, around a lamp post, then out of town and finally… here."

"I won't lie," he said, "I did have some help with that and as always my very first impulse was actually to come to you, only then realizing that you were the one person I couldn't ask in this case, so I instead went to Professor Flitwick about that footprint thing. I'm glad it all worked out, even though I had originally planned to be ready on your arrival."

"Ready for what?" she asked somewhat nervously, her eyes flickering to the boat and then back to him.

"Well," said Harry, then turned and casually hopped into the small wooden vessel with one swift motion, easily keeping his balance – for what is a boat when you are used to flying around on a broomstick? Then he turned around to face her, stretched out his right hand towards her and said, "For you."

Hermione felt a lump in her throat as she gulped ever so slightly. "I have only been on a boat once before," she told him, skeptically eying what seemed to her to be a pretty wobbly incarnation of its kind; not exactly inspiring the greatest confidence. "Not including that one time in Disneyland."

Harry gave a quiet chuckle, smiling warmly at her. "I'm perfectly aware of that," he said. "Now come on, it'll be fine. You rode a flying Hippogriff once, didn't you? How bad can an ordinary boat possibly be?"

"Well," she hesitantly answered, not quite convinced yet, "I was only able to do that because you were with me."

Harry cocked his head to the side, his smile now of the plainly amused kind. "I'm not quite sure I was entirely clear on this," he said, "but I wasn't exactly planning on waving you goodbye from the jetty while you take a leisurely cruise around the lake. I was kind of hoping that you'd let me join you, you know?"

Smiling shyly Hermione took one deep breath, then cautiously stepped to the edge of the planks, held out her left hand to reach for his right and then slowly stepped into the boat with her right foot, flinching a little when the vessel wavered slightly under the weight shift. Harry was quick to support her with both his arms and only let go of her when she safely sat at the stern, looking just a little lost as she apprehensively eyed her surroundings that now consisted of a bit of wood and a lot of water.

Stowing the rope inside the boat near a pile of a multitude of things in the bow and then proceeding to grab one of the oars, Harry was just about to push them away from the jetty when he noticed how timid she looked and stopped short.

"Hey," he spoke to her softly, "you made it sound like a good memory."

Hermione merely looked at him, not quite following for once, so he elaborated, "Six years ago. The boat trip to Hogwarts. The lake, the stars and the lights of the castle?" He motioned around as he mentioned each individual element, then looked back at her. "You didn't mention anything about cowering in fear on the verge of a panic attack."

"Yes, well," Hermione answered sheepishly, "the tale sounds much nicer when I omit a few unnecessary details."

A chuckle escaped Harry's lips, yet he quickly stifled it. "Seriously, though," he said, mostly composed. "We can abort this at any time. Putting you through any kind of ordeal wasn't exactly my intention."

"No, no, no," Hermione was quick to wave him off. "I'm fine. Honestly. I'll just have to adjust a little, that's all. I usually prefer to keep my feet on solid ground. But I _can_ swim, you know?"

"Off we go, then?" he asked, just to make sure.

"Aye, aye," she confirmed with a smile, and Harry finally proceeded to push them away from the jetty.

Then, facing Hermione, he sat down with both oars in his hands and began turning them around so that she ended up facing the distant cliffs where Hogwarts reached into the night sky. He was glad to see plain wonder quickly banish all anxiety from her features. After a moment of simply taking in the breathtaking view she became aware of his eyes on her, and she looked at him in amused suspicion in turn as he slowly rowed them further onto the lake and away from the shore.

"You have really thought this through, haven't you?"

"I might have spent a moment or two contemplating the idea," he confessed with a nonchalant shrug.

"Some preparation obviously went into this," she observed with a look around the boat. "How did you do all this in so little time?"

"Well, actually," he revealed with some reluctance, "this wasn't exactly a last minute kind of thing." When Hermione gave him a quizzical look, clearly expecting further explanation, he continued, "I, uh, I had my mind pretty much set on doing it on Wednesday."

"Wednesday?" she asked, clearly surprised. So much had happened this week that Wednesday felt like half a lifetime ago.

"Yes. The idea came to me while brushing my teeth that morning. You know, after having left your… I mean, after having gone back to my… you know."

"Right," Hermione hastily affirmed.

"Yeah," said Harry, eager to skip the clumsy moment. "So, then I asked Hagrid about the boats yesterday—"

"Oh!" she exclaimed, excited as always when something suddenly made sense. "So that's what you were doing at Hagrid's place!"

"Precisely," he confirmed. "Originally, though, I was planning for this to be a little event for the three of us. You, me and Ron, I mean. Because, as you said yourself that night, the three of us will probably always stick together one way or the other."

"Why the change of plans?"

Harry hesitated for a moment before answering, "It _is_ a pretty small boat."

"Of course," Hermione agreed amusedly, thinking of half the dozen people one could have easily fit into it in addition to Harry and herself.

"He was actually the one to suggest that my idea might be suited more for, uh, two people," he went on to explain. "And hoping that he wasn't actually referring to himself and me, I agreed. So after our manipulated encounter on the bridge I went straight to Flitwick to ask him how to accomplish these magical footprints and then I went to Hogsmeade directly after that to get it all done in time. And thus a plan came together."

"So it was a little last minute after all," she assessed.

"Half and half," he granted with a lopsided smile.

"And you learned how to do those footprints in, what, an hour?" she asked him.

"More like thirty minutes. Not to brag or anything," Harry replied; obviously bragging, though clearly humorously so.

Hermione nodded in acknowledgment. "Consider me impressed."

"À propos," said he, "what do you think about your not so surprising surprise party that I kind of ruined on the bridge?"

"Well," answered Hermione, "as it turns out, attending a party is not quite the same as planning one, and I have to admit I prefer the latter. Let that not be mistaken for a lack of appreciation, though. It's a very nice gesture and I could honestly imagine much worse."

"You do have a vivid imagination, however," he remarked, just a bit suggestively.

"Oh, downright wanton," she replied, a bit more suggestively. "But I don't believe I'm the only one in this boat to whom that applies."

"Well, it's—" Harry pleasantly began, then stopped short and pensively narrowed his eyes. "Wait, were we just flirting? We were, weren't we?"

"Maybe," she allowed in perfect innocence.

"A-ha!" he happily exclaimed, putting the oars back into the water with a more excited splash on this turn; apparently rather pleased with himself. "I'm getting the hang of this."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," she told him, shaking her head with an amused expression.

"Why not?" he asked with a pout, which elicited a short chuckle from Hermione.

"When you are busier with celebrating your successful identification of an ongoing flirt," she explained, "rather than actually getting on with it, you aren't exactly on the fast lane of becoming a master of the art."

"Well," he answered with a sly smile and a voice that meant business, "we can always pick it right up again."

"Oh, stop it," she jokingly waved him off. "You'll make our boat sink in shame."

After sharing a pleasant laugh, they both fell quiet for a while as Harry calmly rowed on and on in slow and controlled circular motions, the boathouses quite a distance behind them by now and the castle coming ever nearer, and contrary to the one in Disneyland its actual size did not turn out to be a disappointing case of false advertising and childish imagination.

For a few minutes they both enjoyed the comfortable silence, the only sounds to be heard being the gentle ripples of water against the boat and the soft splashes of the oars. The slightest of winds calmly blew the cool night air across the placid lake; shimmering in the silvery light of the stars and the moon above.

"Are you cold?" Harry eventually asked her.

"A little, maybe," she admitted.

"I hope you won't accuse me of dubious intentions," he said, letting go of the oars and reaching behind him, "but I actually brought some blankets and pillows. Just in case anyone would like to be comfortable, you know? I also stole a few cookies and some pumpkin juice from the party. And I brought a flask of warm tea as well, since I thought you might prefer that."

Turning around with a red woolen blanket in his hands he found Hermione staring at him with both her eyebrows raised, making him stop in mid-motion.

"If I had known we were moving in together I would have brought my letter box," she said, hardly succeeding in suppressing the smile that forced its way onto her lips.

After taking a moment to properly stick out his tongue at her he reached over and put the blanket over her shoulders, which she gratefully held on to with both her hands to wrap it closer around herself.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Smiling at her, Harry leaned back and was just about to grab the oars again, when – after looking from side to side – he said, "Actually, I think we're there."

Hermione followed his eyes and looked around herself, mentally assessing that they were, in fact, still surrounded by a lot of water.

"Where?" she asked accordingly.

"In the middle of the lake," Harry replied naturally, once more looking first to the left and then to the right; then added with a shrug, "Or near enough, anyhow."

"Huh," made Hermione. "You do realize we could have made the boat move without you working the oars, though, don't you?"

"Well," he answered, "if you ask me, there are some things in life magic cannot make any more magical than they already are. Like with love potions, for example, or that spell that produces a birdsong even when there are no actual birds around. Or some good old-fashioned manual labor you want to show off with in front of the girl you're trying to woo."

"Oh, so that's what you were trying to do the whole time?" she asked playfully, ignoring the warmth she felt in her cheeks as the most immediate response to his outspokenness. "Did that start before or after you began appearing in my bed?"

"Well, you know me," he said in unsurpassable nonchalance. "I like to get right to business. I just gotta have things the moment I want them. So when I see a girl I like, I get to know her inside out and play the friend zone a little and then _bam!_ – six years later I got her right where I want her."

"Like, in a boat with cookies and pumpkin juice?"

"Exactly," he said, pretending to be as conceited as it gets. "Works every time."

Once their mutually enjoyed laughter subsided, Harry asked her as casually as he could manage, "Would you mind if I made this a little more comfortable for us now?"

"Is that part of your routine, too?" she asked in return, grinning even while raising a playfully skeptical eyebrow at him.

"Of course," he answered, standing up and lifting the wooden plank he had been sitting on, then putting it away to the side. After that he grabbed another blanket from the pile of things in the bow and spread it out between him and Hermione, then touched the fabric with the tip of his wand. A second later the blanket abruptly inflated to something with a striking resemblance to a mattress, a few inches thick and filling the whole width of the boat.

"Well," Harry remarked, evidently rather surprised by the result himself, "now I really couldn't blame you if you were to get the wrong ideas. The emergency exit is right behind you, by the way."

"Oh, don't worry," she told him with a giggle. "I'm merely beginning to doubt that those ideas would be all that wrong to begin with."

"Excellent," said Harry, proceeding to grab a few more pillows and blankets from behind him to then spread them out on what now looked very much like a boat-shaped bed. Having done that he sat down right in the middle of it and looked up at Hermione with what was unbeknownst to him a most charming smile. "Voilà!" he said, presenting his work with a gesture of his hands. "Care to join me?"

Utterly unable to wipe the smile off her face and equally unwilling to resist, Hermione slid down from her seat to sit on the mattress-turned blanket with her legs crossed beneath her. For a few seconds they merely looked at each other, until the intensity of their locked gaze suddenly struck them both at the same time, and embarrassed they quickly turned to look somewhere else instead.

For a while they just sat there in mutually appreciated silence, listening to the wind, the water and the beating of their hearts; gazing up at the strikingly clear night sky alit with a billion suns that gazed right back at them from inconceivable distances with magnificent indifference.

"Beautiful," it escaped Hermione's lips in the softest of whispers, and Harry quietly agreed even though it was not the sky his eyes were set on while he spoke.

They remained like that for a few more seconds, until Hermione spoke up, "So, uhm," and at last she lowered her head, although she ended up looking at her hands rather than Harry, "I actually came looking for you because I wanted to talk to you."

"You did?" he asked, genuinely surprised.

"Yes," she affirmed. "I saw you leaving the Broomsticks and then wondered why you would just go without having spoken a single word to me. I wasn't angry or anything, just confused. And maybe just a tad worried."

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that," he said sincerely. "As you now know it was all part of the plan, and I was late to begin with since that thing with the magical trail turned out to be a lot trickier than I had anticipated, especially since I wanted the footprints to look more like your sexy feet rather than my boring shoeprints."

"I see," Hermione replied, pursing her lips to suppress a giggle that tickled in her throat. Then she softly cleared said throat before saying, "So, anyway, after receiving your letter I… I realized there was something I really needed to tell you."

"Hmmm," Harry thoughtfully made, putting an index finger to his chin. "While I am very curious to know what exactly that might be, could we maybe get to your birthday presents first?"

She gave him a questioning look. "I was under the impression that we were kind of in the middle of it."

"Oh, sure," he said with a look around the boat. "But surely you wouldn't expect me to fob you off with a cheap boat trip around the lake and then be done with it? Nah, I also got you this right here."

And with that Harry handed her a flat, black paper box. Somewhat befuddled enough even before gingerly opening it, Hermione was downright baffled when she held its contents dangling in the air in her outstretched hands; a black, tightly cut tank top with a conspicuously low neckline, adorned with a magically flickering flame on the front – glowing, nonetheless. When her confusion didn't seem to lessen even after blankly staring at it for a few seconds, Harry stepped in to assist her and explained, "Since you have such a hard time remembering how hot you are."

And then, to his heart's relief, she finally laughed just as he had hoped she would.

"Good gracious!" she exhaled once she was able to catch a breath. "I hope you are aware I'm never going to wear this in public. Not in Muggle public for obvious reasons, but not in wizarding circles either, for reasons that shouldn't actually be any less obvious."

"Oh, that's okay," he assured her casually. "I'll be totally fine with being the only one to see you in that."

"Uh-huh," Hermione warily said. "Well, it surely is quite something else next to all the gift coupons for Flourish & Blotts, Foyles or Blackwell's I always receive in heaps. Not that I don't like those, but they certainly do not glow quite so… tawdrily."

"Yep," Harry agreed, nodding contentedly as Hermione neatly folded the little fabric that was actually there to be folded and put it back into the box.

"I can only assume this was the highlight and centerpiece of the night," Hermione concluded with some amusement. "So we might as well call it a day."

"I won't lie," said Harry, letting his head drop a little for dramatic effect, "it's humanly impossible to top that. But be that as it may, it's still not everything I got. Maybe I should have better planned the order of presentation, though. So, uh, please adjust your expectations accordingly and note that I got this weeks ago."

"I'm effervescent with apathy."

"Perfect," he said, again reaching behind him and retrieving a small package wrapped in green cloth. From the touch alone Hermione instantly knew what it was, the remaining question – of course – being _which one_ it was. Harry, obviously aware of her quick realization, commented, "I couldn't have one of your birthdays passing by without giving you at least one book. It would just feel wrong, no matter how many coupons you get."

He watched her intently while she unwrapped it, careful as always with her nimble fingers, and he had to restrain himself from telling her how elegant he thought her hands were, thinking that sexy feet and pretty noses had probably been enough signs of obsession to take for one day.

When Hermione finally held a 1968 first edition of _The Last Unicorn_ in her hands, she looked up at him in disbelieving astonishment. "This was my first favorite book," she breathed.

"I know," he said, smiling brightly at her.

"My grandfather read it to me just months before he died," she went on, her voice most fragile as she stared at the book in her hands. "And it was exactly this edition, but the book was lost and never found again after his death. It was already so old, so battered and worn when he read it to me. Just like he himself, I suppose, although I didn't know about his illness and probably would not have understood even if I had."

"I know that too," he said very softly as he felt his heart aching for her.

"I still remember its smell to this day," she whispered, and then she opened the book in the middle and raised it up to her nose. "It smelled very much like this, just mingled with a little grandpa."

When eventually she lowered the book into her lap and slowly raised her head to look at him again, the sight of her face with two tears running down her cheeks from her glistening eyes had a multitude of effects on Harry, and most confusingly all at the same time. His breath was taken away by how beautiful she looked with her face cast in silvery light and shades of blue, and his heart seemed to break simply for the fact that she was weeping, and in his mind he wondered if this had been one of those awful ideas that turn out to be so much better in theory than in practice. His confused contemplation, however, was decisively cut short when he suddenly found himself caught in a fierce hug as Hermione flung her arms around him as if her life depended on it.

"Thank you, Harry," she breathed with a sob, her head resting on his shoulder. "Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me." And then she sighed, and to Harry's puzzlement it sounded a little annoyed. "Ugh, what a stupid thing to say," she admonished herself. "Of course you know what this means to me. That's exactly why you gave it to me."

Harry couldn't help but chuckle at that, and he was relieved to hear her join him. After a while of remaining in their tight embrace and savoring the comfort of their closeness, they both leaned back a little, although they ended up sitting much closer to one another than they had before; their legs still touching. As Hermione wiped the wet traces of her tears from her face with the sleeves of her shirt, Harry, still a little unsure of himself, asked her, "It wasn't a bad gift, was it?"

"What?" Hermione asked in return, genuinely incredulous. "Of course not! How could you even think that?"

"Well, I wasn't exactly planning on making you cry on your birthday," he replied a bit ruefully.

Hermione exhaled a sigh and looked at him affectionately, which he of course missed entirely since he was too busy with staring down at his hands. Noticing that, Hermione reached out and gently put her own left hand over his right, and he looked up at her in surprise.

"There are some tears we can count ourselves lucky to shed," she told him softly, and then – as her lips curled up into a smile – she added, "Trust me, it was one of the best gifts I have ever received, worth so much beyond its probably substantial price tag I have yet to reprimand you for. In fact, it's second only to this gloriously garish top right here."

"You are still hoping that flame on there will eventually burn the bloody thing to ashes, aren't you?"

"Oh, I don't know," Hermione innocently answered as her middle finger began to teasingly wander about his palm, which – unbeknownst to her – gave Harry goosebumps. "I suppose it could be kind of funny under certain circumstances."

Gulping Harry said, "If you go on like that I'll have to go straight for a dive in the cold water."

"Do I really have that kind of effect on you?" she asked him, and now it was his turn to sigh.

"Hermione, how many more tacky shirts will it take for you to finally believe me?" he asked her, half annoyed and half amused. "You really seem to have no idea just what kind of effects you have on me."

"I'm sorry," she answered. "I still have a hard time wrapping my head around all these new… things. And I just don't generally see myself like that."

"Well, I do, and you'd better believe that," he told her emphatically. "And I'm sorry to say, but I see our friendship in serious jeopardy if we can't agree that you are nothing short of a dish."

At that she giggled, unaware that even the sounds she made had their particular effects on Harry. "I guess I'll just have to take your word for it, then."

"You do that," he softly said with a smile, and afterwards they again were quiet for a while, yet not without communication as their hands remained in touch; tentatively exploring, tenderly caressing. Fingers slowly travelled along the lines and shapes of their counterparts, met and intertwined; went on and around and elsewhere found their way back to each other.

"Hermione?" Harry eventually spoke in a near-whisper, his gaze still kept by the connection of their hands.

She looked at him in silence for a moment, her frightened heart wide open; racing with tempestuous hope and anticipation as it dared to glimpse the things that might come next, until there was nothing left to do but say with one last act of will, "Yes?"

"I… I need you to know that I do not take anything you said on the bridge lightly. In fact, I've wrestled with many of those thoughts myself over the course of this week. It's not like I don't think about these things at all, you know?" And then, with a coy smile he teasingly added, "It's just that, at some point, I tend to actually come to some sort of conclusion…"

For that he earned a deserved, albeit playful slap on the leg.

"Seriously, though," he continued. "I understand your doubts and your worries, I really do. And I would even agree with them all if it weren't for one simple fact."

He looked directly at her then, and she met his eyes unwaveringly.

"We can't go back, Hermione," he said. "We've already crossed the threshold. The door is wide open and we can't just close it and forget what we glimpsed inside. It's too much, too big, too deep. You said so yourself. We can't pretend. We can't ignore these thoughts and feelings, these new sensations that have awoken inside of us. We can't just go back to being blind and stupid. Our friendship has already changed. It has already begun to grow into something else. And we can't undo that. And frankly, I don't see why we should even want to.

"Yes, there are risks. Of course there are. I don't profess to know the future and I'm not naïve enough to believe there will be no challenges along the way. I wouldn't go into this expecting us to be perfect bliss and harmony all the time. I would fully expect us to be tested. I would expect fights and tears and broken things. But I also find myself unable to imagine that we wouldn't work our way through it each and every single time, because that's just who we are; how we've always been.

"Would we be taking a gamble? Maybe. But isn't that what everybody does? You either take the leap or you don't, but you don't take the leap because you know what will happen. You take it because you see a vision of something that is worth taking any risk for. In these matters there is no certainty. Never and for no one. There is only your own heart to cling to and the chance for something great and wonderful, and you either seize it or you let it slip. And the way I see it, we are actually far ahead of the game. I mean, so many people are married, have kids and are just one more breakdown away from calling their lawyer even before knowing each other half as well as we already do.

"But we know, Hermione. We might not know what we're getting into, but we do know who we would be getting into it with. I know you better than I know myself and you know me best of all. I cannot look at this as anything but the best thing that ever happened to me. To have been lucky enough to meet you under these most improbable of circumstances; lucky enough to become your friend and have you in my life to cherish. And then to be lucky enough to… to fall in love with you, Hermione Jane Granger. My best friend. To realize what you really mean to me. That's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. And I would never forgive myself for not trying everything to make it real.

"I don't want to be with you because others seem to expect it. I don't want to be with you out of convenience. I don't want to be with you because we're a good team. I need you, yes. That has been abundantly clear for six years now. Six years I wouldn't even have survived if it weren't for you. But I don't love you because I need you; I need you because I love you.

"And when I say that… it's more than just words. It's not an empty phrase. It's not a reflex and it's not a fancy way for hormones to speak up in the name of procreation. It's not a fleeting thing, not merely an impulse born from an ephemeral emotion. When I say that I love you, I mean exactly that. I love you for who you really are, and I know it. Because I know you. I don't just love the way you see me, or the way you make me look. I don't love my own reflection in your eyes. I love you, and only you. Everything you are.

"And honestly? I don't believe that's the news of the week. That is not what has changed. My eyes may have been opened, yet what they see has been there all along – right in front of them. The only thing that has changed is… is that I can't stop thinking about you; that I can't stop wondering how your lips would feel on mine; that I can't stop pondering if your skin would feel as soft as it looks; that I can't stop yearning to be near you, with nothing left between us.

"I just… I want to be with you, Hermione. In every possible way two human beings can be together. And yes, if we were to fail and break apart, I honestly don't know what would remain of us. But the thing is, I just don't see us failing. I can't. I think this is it. This is our chance. You and I against whatever the world might throw our way. The only way for us to fail is to deny it. The chance for something great is there for the taking, but we still have to reach for it with our own hands and we can only do that together."

His stream of words left a silence so complete that time seemed to have stopped, yet their two hearts were the clocks that reminded them of life with every beat. When Hermione lowered her head, something inside of him faltered for one agonizing second, until he felt something touch his left hand and he looked down as well to find that now both his hands were intertwined with hers. And then, quite simultaneously, they both looked up again and their eyes met with absolute immediacy.

And Hermione softly whispered, "Then let's."

And both their eager hearts were drumming wildly as they slowly leaned into each other, their eyes either gazing into the depths they were ineluctably drawn to or flickering down towards the pair of lips their own longed so much to touch; parting ever so slightly in trembling anticipation. With only inches left between them their eyes locked one last time, and whatever veil had once been between them was there no more. There now was nothing but devotion as they surrendered to each other utterly and completely, and their eyes fell shut as their lips most tenderly met; giving in, giving up to a force far too strong to resist as it surged through the cores of their very being, unifying them.

Soon their hands went each their way, seeking to touch necks and cheeks and run through hair; travel down spines and up the length of arms; wrap around a slender waist and hold on to shoulders wide. As their lips and tongues increased in boldness and in hunger, their kiss intensified as Harry gave in to Hermione's body pushing against his own, and he slowly let himself drop onto his back with her on top of him.

Besotted and enthralled by every sound and touch, inebriated with each other's scent and taste, their sensual frenzy continued for minutes upon minutes without restraint or respite as waves of pure emotion kept washing over them, engulfing them completely; an insatiable celebration of an affection that only now found itself set loose.

Until, of course, their lungs began to protest, and even though that in turn made every other part of their heated bodies protest vigorously, without air to go on even their greedy lips had to yield to necessity eventually, and so their first kiss came to an end, leaving an echo in every fiber of their being and an imprint on their young hearts.

Lying right next to each other they both were panting for breath.

"If I had known this was what we were missing out on—" Hermione breathed, huffing and puffing.

"Yeah," Harry wholeheartedly agreed, smiling dreamily. "I'd say we have a lot of catching up to do."

Hermione chuckled as much as her lungs allowed. "I'm looking forward to it."

For a minute or so they let their bodies calm down; or recharge, as both of them quietly preferred to call it.

"By the way, what did you want to tell me?" he asked when this distant memory from the mundane life before their kiss came to him and he found the breath to speak more properly again.

"Oh," Hermione replied a bit woozily, her breathing more composed by now, but still having trouble catching a coherent thought. "Just to forget everything I told you on the bridge."

And then she looked up at him, and he looked right back at her with a mixture of amusement and puzzlement on his features.

"Seriously?" he asked her. "That's what you came here to tell me?"

Without breaking their gaze she nodded, then softly, tentatively whispered, "And… and maybe that I… that I want you… that I need you… that I love you."

For a moment he looked overwhelmed, lost in the emotional currents that surged through him. Then, however, his lips turned into a lopsided, somewhat mischievous smile as he tenderly caressed her cheek with his thumb, and he said, "Well, I suppose that would've worked too."

And then his lips closed around hers once more, and she received him readily, eagerly, as a soft moan escaped her throat only to get lost somewhere amidst the unbridled dance their tongues were quick to resume, and everything around them seemed to melt away into something infinite, with the both of them at the combusting center of it all; the fierce eruption of an ardent desire finally unveiled, at last unleashed; two young souls embarking on a passionate discovery of lands uncharted, unknowingly – in their unreflecting relish of the moment – making memories that would last them for a lifetime.

And when at last, yet not without reluctance, their lips parted in blissful numbness and exhaustion, they lay together entangled and entwined, breathing heavily as their delirious hearts – beating side by side in unison – calmed only slowly. Yet so tired they were, and so perfectly their bodies fit together, that neither of them, relieved of all conscious thought, was aware of how they gradually, gently drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep, adrift in the middle of the lake under the starlit night sky; caring not for whatever shores the waters might eventually take them to.

And in this September night neither of them teleported anywhere, for they already were exactly where they both belonged.

~Ω~

* * *

**Annotations & Allusions**

_Cormac McCruise:_ Don't even ask me how this one happened, but somehow, my portrayal of Cormac McLaggen became a tribute to the incomparable Tom Cruise. If your next question is either "What?" or "Why?" or "Who's Tom Cruise?" then search for "Tom Cruise scientology" on YouTube and – behold.

_To pee or not to pee:_ Tough one, isn't it? It could be Hamlet again, though I cannot quite shake off the feeling that he said it a little differently…

_To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle_: This is a quote from one of George Orwell's essays. I thought about using my own words to express the same meaning (I do that sometimes), but decided to give another nod to the man since I found myself thinking of that essay anyway. And while he might not have known it at the time he wrote that, he was clearly talking about Harry and Hermione.

_Erich Fromm:_ The juxtaposition "I [don't] love you because I need you"/"I need you because I love you" is very much based on Fromm's thoughts on the much discussed and pondered matter of love. This particular distinction is, according to him, the difference between immature and mature love. Personally, I tend to agree.


	10. Epilogue: Prospects

**Author's Note:** This is it, folks! The journey's end, the last farewell, the… wait, we already did that, didn't we? I'm serious, though. It's done. And here I am, just a teeny tiny little bit proud to finally have finished a novel-length story, and you guys still go on about how quick and short and swiftly done it all was. For Merlin's sake, people! Read slower!

* * *

**• Epilogue •**

**Prospects**

The sun was brightly shining down on them, the sky a perfect blue with here and there single small white puffs of clouds lazily adrift; few and far between. Given the occasion people couldn't help but think that it was very nice of the sun to greet them all so warmly, yet they only managed to remain thankful for its persistent appearance since it was accompanied by a gentle breeze that kept the day from being hot beyond enjoyment. It was, all in all, what most people might just consider perfect weather, and in combination with its conspicuously perfect timing after two weeks of constant rain, it was all a bit suspicious. Around Hogwarts, as everyone knew and nobody really cared, not even the weather could be trusted to be entirely free of any magical trickery.

In other places it might have been frowned upon as a breach of decorum to doff the official ceremonial robes all seventh year students were expected to wear to the occasion, but no other than Headmaster Dumbledore himself had begun his introductory speech by telling them that there was no sensible reason for them to spend their last day as students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry sweating like pigs in a boiling cauldron. At that most of the gathered students had gladly discarded their long and encumbering garments with no small amount of relief, and while regrettable from a strictly aesthetical point of view, since the robes that were exclusively worn on this one special day – elegantly cut and richly adorned in the vibrant colors of the four houses – gave the whole occasion a very solemn atmosphere, it had certainly served to greatly increase the average mood around the crowd.

Seated on more than two hundred chairs, all the students, first through seventh year, attended the ceremony outside in the freshly mown meadow, listening to Dumbledore as he stood on a large stage in front of them, with all the staff members seated in a line behind him – including Rubeus Hagrid, Argus Filch and Dobby, although neither of them ever managed to look quite as official as everybody else, and each for their own reasons. Above the stage a large banner hovered freely in the air, fluttering gently in the wind yet always staying put, and to many a wizard's latent puzzlement it read, _'May the magic be with you, class of 1997!' _– an allusion every Muggle-born student was happy to enlighten their less pop-culturally educated friends with.

And after the Headmaster's characteristically whimsical and nonetheless oddly inspiring speech, the four Heads of Houses began to call up all the students that were graduating this year to come up to the stage and receive their N.E.W.T. certificates, beginning once more – just as it had nearly seven years ago – with _'Abbott, Hannah'_, only this time it was Professor Sprout who called out her name. Many smiles were flashed, many hands were shaken and a few steps were nervously stumbled over, and there was a lot of applause all throughout; especially whenever someone stumbled. At the end of the official part of the ceremony, many silly looking hats were thrown into the air, and while many wondered why that was, everyone was more than willing to enjoy the one moment in their life when they got to throw away a hat that looked stupid when worn anyway. The best thing about these particular hats was, of course, that they exploded into little fireworks up above their heads, which actually prompted some of the students to ask if there were any more silly looking hats to throw.

After all that very orderly sitting and smiling and hat-throwing, people were eager to get to the more casual part of the day, which mostly consisted of doing whatever everyone wanted to do. There were tents and tables, games and music, drinks and snacks, and even some of the more outgoing professors – Dumbledore himself obviously on the forefront – joined the exuberant festivities. Others, like Professor Snape, merely endured.

There was one guy who sat at a table and watched the joyous activities around him with a faint but contented smile on his relaxed features, leaning back in his chair with his ceremonial robes flung over the empty chair next to him and his glasses lying on the table in front of him. The first two or three buttons of his white shirt were open and its sleeves were rolled up to his elbows; a red tie hung loosely around his neck. The favorable absence of any silly looking hat exposed his disheveled black hair. He watched amusedly as Dobby entertained a group of first years with a few magical tricks from his special house-elf repertoire, and he gave a quiet chuckle when he saw Seamus sneak up to his fellow Irishman Declan to empty a huge jug of Butterbeer right above the unsuspecting Head Boy's head. Next to them Neville, Dean and others burst out laughing.

And after witnessing Luna grabbing a helpless Ron by his tie and dragging him off towards a wooden platform where others were already dancing, which Ron himself would probably have described as impending doom judging by the horrified look on his face, Harry leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Taking a deep breath and enjoying the warmth of the sunlight on his face, he felt as calm and serene as he had never imagined he would on this or any other day. Reflecting on two marvelously ordinary years of school during which no one had tried to kill him even once, he could hardly believe his luck, especially considering he'd just had the best final year of school he could have ever hoped to have.

With memories and anecdotes of what by his admittedly unique standards surely qualified as the least eventful months of his life flashing through his mind and assessing that they had, without a doubt, been the most exciting ones, Harry suddenly – yet not startlingly – felt a pair of slender arms lightly wrapping around his chest.

"Not in public, Severus," he said with a lopsided smile, his eyes remaining shut.

"_Ewww!_" he heard the most familiar of all voices protest.

At that he opened his eyes and found his favorite face hovering just a few inches above him, from his perspective obviously upside down.

"Hey, you," he greeted her softly. "I was just thinking about you."

"Is that so?" she asked him. "I'm gone for a few minutes and you spend them thinking about me? You are such a clinger."

"How long exactly are you planning on standing there without giving me a kiss?" he asked her. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

With a chuckle she willingly closed the little distance between their lips, and their kiss was soft and intimate, lingering for just a moment.

"Are you done with your Head Girl duties for the day?" he then asked.

"For the most part, yes," she replied. "And then there's just tomorrow left. One last time being responsible for the trip to the train station and then overseeing the Hogwarts Express on our last return journey."

"Feels a little strange, doesn't it?"

"It's a bit daunting, actually," she said pensively. "But then, at the same time, I am kind of excited about… whatever comes next."

"Anything specific in mind?"

She smiled at that. "Hmmm… there's you and me… and a whole lot of uncertainty," she then answered. "And I couldn't care less about the latter."

"How utterly irresponsible of you, Miss Granger," he said in mock disapproval.

"Well," said she, "I _am_ known to be a pretty reckless lass."

Grinning, Harry loosely touched the back of her neck with one hand and gently pulled her down towards him, kissing her once more.

"Yikes!" another familiar voice interrupted their intimacy. "You just have zero respect for the natural order of things, have you?"

Two faces with one eyebrow raised on each turned to look at Ron, who stood to their side with Luna right next to him. "You should've stopped behaving so sickeningly lovestruck half a year ago," he told them. "Where's the fatigue and the boredom, the intrigue and the drama?"

"Well, Hermione just let me know that I'm too much of a clinger and to be perfectly honest I kind of think the same of her," Harry revealed. "So, yeah, some serious breaking up might be in the air."

"Definitely," Hermione agreed.

"Ugh," made Ron, clearly disgusted. "Agreeing even on your breakup reasons. You guys are impossible."

"Don't listen to him," Luna pleasantly chimed in. "He's just been in an identity crisis ever since he can't help you guys figure each other out anymore."

"Good times," Ron reminisced dreamily. "You guys should really consider breaking up once in a while so I can work on getting you back together. I'm sure the collective staff of Hogwarts would be delighted to contribute as well."

"Oh Merlin, anything but that again," Hermione lamented, burying her face in Harry's shoulder.

"Yeah," her human hideout agreed. "I think we had enough public embarrassment to last us for at least another Jupiter cycle."

"How long's that again?" asked Ron.

"Long, I hope," said Harry.

"Just about twelve Earth-years," Luna offered.

"Not long enough," Hermione mumbled, her voice muffled by Harry's shirt.

"Anyway," Ron went on to say with a grin, "us and some of the guys are going for a swim in the lake. You guys coming too?"

Hermione raised her head to look at Harry and the two of them didn't say anything at all for two or three seconds.

"Could you guys at least talk like normal people do?" Ron complained, throwing his hands into the air. "You know… with words?"

Smiling the two of them looked back at their despairing red-haired friend and Harry pleasantly let him know, "We're right behind you."

Rolling his eyes even while being unable to keep an amused smile from curling up his own lips, Ron turned around with his arms around Luna's shoulders and together they headed off towards where the lake lay down below the hills, with a group of a few other people walking into the same direction already a bit ahead of them.

Harry rose from his chair and put his glasses back onto his nose. Then he gingerly ran his hands over the soft fabric of his ceremonial robes as his eyes wandered over the scenery once more; the happy people between the tents and the tables, seemingly with no care in the world; the large stage with the banner above and in the background, higher still, the castle reaching up into the blue sky, its windows and spires glinting brightly in the sunlight; the place that would forever hold seven most unforgettable years of his life inside its many halls and corridors, its towers and its dungeons, its secret chambers and enchanted rooms.

When he felt a hand intertwining with his own he was gently taken out of his silent reverie, back into the present. With his eyes flickering back towards the stage he smilingly said, "Nice banner, by the way."

With a chuckle Hermione answered, "Well, I wanted to ruthlessly abuse my power as Head Girl at least once before leaving Hogwarts."

Harry, while unhurriedly beginning to follow after Ron and Luna with Hermione by his hand, raised a skeptical eyebrow at her. "Once, you say? I believe I could think of at least one or two other occasions. Like that one time, when you kicked those poor girls out of the prefect's bathroom so you could have it all to yourself?"

Blushing ever so slightly Hermione replied, "Not just for myself, as you might recall."

"Oh, most vividly," said Harry with a mischievous smile. "Let's call it social service, then – almost altruistic, really."

"Have you heard, by the way?" she asked him, more or less elegantly skipping past the shamefully delightful topic of her previous abuses of power. "They'll begin shooting that new Star Wars movie next week here in the UK."

"Oh! Well," he said, "what could possibly go wrong?"

"At least they don't have Disney doing it, or something like that."

"What an absurd notion," Harry commented with a snort.

As they walked through the pathless woods that covered the gently descending hills between the meadows where the festivities were taking place and the lakeside, they remained quiet for a while, simply enjoying each other's company, the cooling shadows under the thick canopy of the trees and the rustling of the wind in the lush green leaves. In between the many trunks and all the undergrowth, the glistening water of the lake was already visible and the nearer they came the clearer they heard laughter, excited voices and splashes of water. A small distance ahead of them, Ron and Luna were just stepping out of the tree line and onto the shore.

When Hermione heaved a sigh, it was the first sound either of the two of them had made in minutes. "Do you think they'll make it?" she then asked thoughtfully.

Harry looked first at her and then back to what her eyes seemed to be fixed on; the backs of their two friends.

"How do you mean?" he asked. "Like, for life?"

"I was thinking more of the year ahead," she answered.

"We're awfully cynical today," Harry quipped, earning a good-humored scowl from Hermione in return.

"I mean because Ron is leaving school and Luna will be back here for another year, you buffoon."

"Oh," said Harry, genuinely surprised. "I didn't even really think about that."

"You don't say," Hermione remarked with a toneless voice, and for some reason she received an exaggeratedly wet and noisy smooch on her cheek for that, which made her giggle.

"I don't know," Harry then answered her question after taking another moment to think about it more properly. "They seem to work out surprisingly well. Ron even seems to have come to some sort of arrangement with her imaginary friends. And she in turn is utterly smitten with her _adorable klutz_. So… I suppose they might just make it, don't you think?"

"Maybe, yes," Hermione replied, then paused before tentatively going on, "And what about us? Do you think we would make it through something like that?"

"A year we'd have to mostly spend apart from one another?"

She nodded, and Harry casually shrugged his shoulders.

"There's no doubt we would," he asserted naturally. "But we, of course, would simply cheat and just start teleporting into each other's beds again."

"Do you think that would work across larger distances?" Hermione asked, all serious as she bit her lower lip to ponder the question herself.

Harry stopped short and Hermione only involuntarily followed suit when she was abruptly held back by her hand entwined with his, turning around to look at him in puzzlement.

"Could you please not ruin that awesomely romantic sentiment I just dished out with your technicalities there?" he asked her with a barely suppressed smile, which then found itself mirrored threefold on Hermione's own lips. Closing the distance between them she wrapped her arms around his waist, which he reciprocated likewise.

"That is certainly a possibility," she whispered flirtatiously, and after nine months Harry had indeed become so adept at the art that he didn't point out every flirt he successfully identified anymore. "But you'd have to convince me a little that there's something more interesting to occupy my mind than my much-valued technicalities."

"Let me think about that for just a second," he replied, feigning some serious contemplation. "I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something."

"Seriously, guys," someone who swiftly passed them by said. "Get a room."

"There are children around," that someone's identical twin added, shaking his head at them disapprovingly as he followed his brother towards the lake.

"Like fawns and stuff," said Fred, practically shouting since he was already quite a bit past them.

"Wouldn't want to scar those poor things for life with your indecent public exchange of bodily fluids," George added, picking up some speed to catch up with his brother.

"Respect the wildlife!" Fred yelled, probably making all the wildlife within earshot wonder what the hell was going on with those rambunctious bipeds again.

Looking after them they saw that both the Weasley twins were wearing nothing but bright blue swim trunks – identical ones, of course. Fred and George Weasley rarely came unprepared, which meant quite a lot considering their apparent tendency to appear virtually everywhere.

"So," Harry then said, almost as if nothing had disturbed their conversation at all, "what do you think? Yours or mine?"

With a most roguish smile curling up one corner of her lips, Hermione casually opened another button on Harry's shirt with a lazy flick of her finger, then teasingly ran said finger up over his chest, then up his neck and along his jawline, and following the motion with her eyes she only looked up at him when her fingertip finally came to rest on his lower lip, giving it a slight pull. Then, as her right hand wandered from his lips to the back of his neck and her left hand grabbed his tie to slowly pull him down to her, she hoarsely breathed, "Wherever."

And then, when their lips – aquiver with anticipation – parted and were just a fraction of an inch away from touching, she suddenly let go of him and conversationally said, "Now let's go for a swim."

Laughing, Harry helplessly looked on as Hermione turned and walked a few steps away from him, then halted and turned to face him once more with a blatantly amused expression on her features.

"You are insidious, you know that?" he asked her, shaking his head in consternation.

"Who? Me?" she asked, perfectly innocent. "I am merely making sure you'll have all the energy you'll need tonight when it counts."

"Now that's just… I mean, seriously…" he stammered, then broke off with a sigh and just looked at her for a moment. "I love you ridiculously much, you know that? Sometimes my feelings for you make me feel like a walking weepie."

"Great," said Hermione as she slowly came back to him. "Now that you've said that I can't possibly walk away the way I had planned. You know, with smug confidence in my seductive prowess and some especially deliberate swaying of my hips and all that stuff."

"While I certainly would have liked to see that," said Harry rather huskily, pulling her closer to himself, "right now I just need to kiss you. Like, very badly."

"Then please, by all means, proceed."

And proceed they did, and for quite a while too, presumably traumatizing any unsuspecting fawn that might or might not have stumbled upon this most obtrusive display of unrestrained affection. Just when a moan of pleasure escaped Hermione's throat, Harry left her lips, grinning slyly.

"What are you doing?" she asked him a bit dizzily.

"Just making sure you don't squander all your energy here and now, where by your own judgment it doesn't count."

Hermione took a deep breath, most likely to complain, but then she just ended up exhaling the air as a long sigh of defeat instead. "Well played," she granted flatly.

"I've learned from the best," he said with a wink. "Now, shall we finally join the others? I can only imagine the tales they are already spinning about our naughty woodland adventures. And if we don't go now, those tales might actually end up having some truth to them."

And beaming at each other they continued hand in hand, only coming to a stop once more when they reached the tree line with the lake opening up before them. Fred and George were just jumping off a long, sturdy branch that hovered two meters above the water, right into the middle of a group of other boys and girls who were already dabbling about; the violent splashes of the twins' impact eliciting laughter and good-humored complains.

"Odd, isn't it?" Hermione spoke eventually, and Harry turned his head to look at her attentively. "This lake turns out to be quite the place to close one chapter and open the next one."

"A good place to make memories," Harry concurred, and Hermione knowingly smiled at him.

"How about one more, then?" she asked him softly.

And Harry's lips mirrored Hermione's as he answered, "One more."

And with that they finally joined the others for one more youthful day they would never forget. Was all well, then? Today at least it was. And to Harry nothing else mattered, for today life was good. The future was uncertain, as it always is by its very nature. There still remained that matter with the most powerful Dark Wizard of all time who was still scheming his untimely demise, now probably more so than ever with him leaving the immediate protection of the place the other most powerful Wizard of this age called his home. There was still a prophecy that would one day be fulfilled one way or the other. A lot to face, a lot to lose.

But whatever road untraveled lay ahead of him yet, for the first time in his life Harry actually saw the clear possibility of a future, the vision of a life worth fighting for to the last; first evoked in the endless depths of a pair of chocolate brown eyes, wherein he found the solace, the strength and the courage to look ahead with hope and confidence, feeling like he could take it all on, prevail and live on – for on this day he knew that he was not alone. And while determined to treasure each and every single moment of peace that he would be granted along the way, deep inside his loving heart he believed that he and Hermione might just succeed in sleeping happily ever after.

At least once they would finally get a room.

**~ The End ~**

* * *

**Afterword (this time it's personal)**

What an absurdly happy, obscenely lighthearted story! I think I'm a little disgusted with myself right now. Nobody died, nobody suffered or despaired. Except maybe Malfoy a little, but who cares about that? Ugh. If I had any reputation to speak of, it would be in serious jeopardy right now.

I'm not going to lie, though. Writing this was pure joy and exactly what I needed; an escapist's haven. I spent two months (the two hottest months, no less) working on this, in a year that so far has not been the most delightful for me. I wouldn't be surprised if the creation of this story were to remain one of this year's highlights to look back on at the end of December. And to tell you the truth, that would be perfectly fine.

It's been good. And the fact that it's actually the first truly novel-length story I have managed to finish only adds to that. I don't yet know if this is a step on a longer journey or not, if this is progress on the road to Elsewhere (an elusive place where I finally write "real" stuff), or if it's just what it is: a good thing in and of itself, no matter if it leads anywhere or not. The time I enjoyed writing it won't go anywhere.

And while being somewhat satisfied with something I did is quite a fascinating sensation on its own, it's made all the better by the positive response to it I received from you people out there. If I contributed to you having a few nice hours in your life, something to laugh and smile about or something to warm your heart a little, then that in turn gives something of great value back to me.

I thank each and every one of you around the world for reading, reviewing and hopefully enjoying my story; for participating, for connecting, for appreciating. It is, in turn, appreciated beyond words.

I raise my glass of pumpkin juice and say, "To the memories that stay, even when we go astray." (Yeah, I'm drunk. On pumpkin juice, no less.)

For now, farewell!


End file.
